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Corals are poster children for the harms of climate change, with vibrant reefs withered to bleached barrens as temperatures climb and waters become more acidic. Even as scientists work to restore reefs, they have long lacked stable cell lines for probing corals’ cellular and molecular workings. While cells can be isolated for a time, they inevitably fail to thrive. Establishing so-called immortal lines in the lab would allow researchers to investigate critical questions about why corals bleach, what mediates their symbiotic relationships with microalgae, and how they form their skeletons.
In search of a solution, a team of scientists in Japan, including comparative genomicist Noriyuki Satoh at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, collected adults of the reef-building Acropora tenuis from around Okinawa and Ishigaki islands. Rather than isolate cells from these adults, the researchers induced the corals to spawn and produce planulae, tiny larvae ...
