USING UNIQUE GENETIC TAGS TO MONITOR CORAL RESTORATION EFFORTS OVER TIME

 

Like all good stories, Max’s story began on a boogie board. Born on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Max grew up near the ocean, belly sliding and boogying waves before he could walk. Since then, he has slightly matured and enjoys riding waves in other forms, such as on surfboards, canoes, sailboats or alaiʻa (traditional wooden boards).

 

  

   Surfing Kailua back in the day, tongue out in the zone.

 

 

Max feels lucky to have grown up with the ocean as such a close friend. However, it is no secret that his friend is in some real trouble. Max wanted to help, but with so many problems affecting the ocean, where do you start?

“Well, I guess you start at the beginning. And no, I don’t mean boogie boarding. The Hawaiian creation story begins in a world of night and darkness. However, one day the night gives birth to light, and from the light is born the first living creature: ka ʻuku koʻakoʻa – the coral polyp – from which all other living being are descended. For us, coral is the start, not just in an ecological sense, but in that it is all of our oldest ancestor, our great¹⁰⁰ grandmother. So it seemed like a good place to begin.”

Max started off working in the Coral Resilience Lab at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, whose focus was to understand how corals can overcome anthropogenic stressors. Leaving Hawaii to attend University at Pomona College in California, he studied the immortality of Hydra and was exposed to many genetic techniques for the first time. He also has spent time living in Costa Rica doing coral restoration with Raising Coral CR and has spent many months in the field removing marine debris from the remote atolls of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

 

 

    Coral restoration using MARS reef stars with Raising Coral Costa Rica in Cahuita National Park.

 

 

 

With experience from his past roles, there was still a lot to learn, and his next destination was Australia. Max began his journey in Australia working at AIMS in Townsville helping the gene editing team and beginning some of his own experiments during the 2023 spawning. He has recently moved to Perth in June to begin a Masters by Research and continue the projects.

 

    Collecting gametes to be used for gene editing experiments in Seasim at AIMS Townsville.

 

Max’s project while with AIMS@UWA looks to combine gene editing and environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques to create a monitoring system for coral restoration. With anthropogenic climate change having detrimental effects on reefs worldwide, the implementation of coral restoration has been increasing. This is similarly the case in Australia, where plans for restoration are working on the scale of millions of individuals. However, there is no way to effectively monitor efforts over time on this scale with current visual survey techniques. This project looks to create a possible remedy to that problem by giving corals unique genetic tags and seeing if we can find those tags in water samples (eDNA).

The first part of Max’s project looks at harness the power of CRISPR-Cas9 mediated genome editing to see if he can insert a benign genetic barcode into coral that can then be searched for using eDNA. While CRISPR-Cas9 has been used on corals in the past to generate random mutations at a locus, this project will develop a way to make controlled mutations with a variety of Cas9 and dCas9 base editing methods. The second part looks to use eDNA to non-invasively understand intraspecific genetic variation in coral populations. Through water samples, he will be able to detect haplotype frequencies of a single species on a reef, which is especially important in a clonal species like coral.

Putting these together creates a novel approach to coral reef monitoring and develops techniques that can be applied to answer a wide range of questions. 

 

 

    Settlement trials of corals mutant for HSF1