2018 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Revealing evolutionary history of corals using whole genomes of five Acropora species
| Project/Area Number |
17J00557
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| Research Institution | Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University |
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Principal Investigator |
MAO Yafei 沖縄科学技術大学院大学, 科学技術研究科, 特別研究員(DC1)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-26 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | WGD / Bioinformatics |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Understanding speciation and diversification is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Reef-building corals contribute to tropical ecosystem, supporting 30% marine organisms. Yet, we have little knowledge about the evolutionary history of reef-building corals.
Acropora is one of the most dominant and diversified reef-building coral genus in Indo-Pacific Ocean, in order to understand its evolutionary history, I used five Acropora genomes to test the hypothesis that Whole-genome duplication occurred in Acropora. Importantly, recent study showed that Whole-genome duplication plays an important role in speciation and diversification, therefore, testing the hypothesis that Whole genome duplication in Acopora is important for coral research and coral conservation.
Last year, I have shown that introgression occurred in Acropora (Mao et.al, Current Biology, 2018) and then I found that Whole-genome duplication might occurred in Acropora too. Then, I used three different methods to show that Whole-genome duplication occurred in Acropora. This work is published on iScience (Mao et.al, iScience, 2019) and I also built a bioinformatic pipeline for Whole genome duplication inference (Mao, PeerJ, 2019). Both work contribute to coral research.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
1: Research has progressed more than it was originally planned.
Reason
This year, I have done the work to infer whole-genome duplication in Acropora with three different methods. These work have been published on iScience and PeerJ (Mao et al, iScience, 2019; Mao, PeerJ, 2019)
In addition, I went to Princeton University for 5 month to learn the functional genomic methods with Prof. Mallarino.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I used five Acropora genomic data to show that WGD occurred in Acropora. This work seems like important contribution for polyploidy and coral research. Next, I will focus on writing a review on hybridization on reef corals.
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