Establishment of a long-term reef-building coral biopsy archive as a tool for the marine biology research community

10.29926/platax.202312_20.0002

Anderson B. Mayfield

bio-archive ； biopreservation ； biorepository ； coral reefs ； marine ecology

Platax

2023卷（2023 / 12 / 01）

7 - 30

英文

Coral reefs are in demise across the planet, with many relics of their former selves. In most instances, samples collected in one experiment, or during a particular field expedition, are never again used, nor are the biopsies (or molecules extracted from them) shared with colleagues or archived in biorepositories. Herein I advocate that a greater degree of sample sharing be adopted by marine biologists for at least two reasons. First, the corals from which many such biopsies have been taken have likely perished, meaning that the only information (aside from images & raw data) that will exist for these invaluable research subjects must be derived from these very biopsies. Secondly, reuse of previously obtained biopsies lessens environmental damage; although sampling of small (~100 mg) tissue specimens from entire coral colonies is unlikely to impact their survival, extraction of whole cores with drills, or sacrificing of entire fragments from branching species, could pose a significant risk to source colonies (especially if they are not sustainably harvested). In this article, I have outlined pertinent information (e.g., whereabouts & storage conditions) of coral samples obtained from not only the world's largest coral reef survey, the Living Oceans Foundation's "Global Reef Expedition," but also select aquarium and field experiments undertaken in Taiwan and Florida. I anticipate that this global reef coral sample archive, which is associated with a dataset whose levels of biological organization span molecules to entire ocean basins, will serve as a long-term research tool for the research community, if only to serve as a "physiological snapshot" of these corals in the period just prior to the fundamental shift in their biology caused by global climate change.