ABOVE: A close-up shot of Stylophora pistillata polyps. The brown tint comes from symbiotic dinoflagellates.
SHANI LEVY
Coral reefs face myriad stressors, from pollution to climate change. Understanding how they respond to these threats on a molecular level is essential for predicting what will happen to them in the years to come and devising the best means of protecting them, says Tali Mass, a marine ecologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Unfortunately, relatively scant knowledge about the different cell types in their bodies has hindered that kind of research.
To fill in those gaps, she and her colleagues published a complete cell atlas from the smooth cauliflower coral (Stylophora pistillata) in Cell on May 3. Among the 40 cell types described were two kinds of immune cells, the first cells specialized for immunity reported for any coral.
“This is something we’ve been needing to do forever in coral science,” ...
