Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration in the Omics Age

The rapid demise of coral reefs worldwide has spurred efforts to develop innovative conservation and restoration methods. Many of these rely on omics approaches to produce genetic, genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic or metabolomic data to inform conservation and restoration interventions. This book provides the state of play of this field. It discusses topics ranging from how genomic and environmental DNA (eDNA) data can be used to inform marine protected area design and cryopreservation strategies, the use of knowledge on adaptive genetic and epigenetic variation to maximise environmental stress tolerance of coral stock, harnessing transcriptome data to develop early warning markers, the use of microbial symbiont omics data in guiding restoration strategies, to applications of metabolomics and genetic engineering. How best to translate omics data to resource managers is also discussed.

Autorentext

Madeleine van Oppen is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. She completed her PhD on the molecular biogeography of seaweeds in 1995, followed by postdocs on the population and evolutionary genetics of Cichlid fishes and reef-building corals. Her current research is aimed at enhancing climate resilience of corals. Manuel Aranda is an Associate Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. In 2006 he completed his PhD on the evolution of gene regulatory networks in insects, followed by a postdoc in the same field before moving to work on corals. In his current research he uses genomics and epigenomics approaches to study the molecular underpinnings of the coral-algal symbiosis and the potential of human interventions to increase their resilience.