Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

DOI

10.1186/s12915-023-01630-1

Publication Title

BMC Biology

Volume

21

Issue

1

Pages

147 (1-15)

Abstract

Background: Mesophotic coral communities are increasingly gaining attention for the unique biological diversity they host, exemplified by the numerous mesophotic fish species that continue to be discovered. In contrast, many of the photosynthetic scleractinian corals observed at mesophotic depths are assumed to be depth-generalists, with very few species characterised as mesophotic-specialists. This presumed lack of a specialised community remains largely untested, as phylogenetic studies on corals have rarely included mesophotic samples and have long suffered from resolution issues associated with traditional sequence markers.

Results: Here, we used reduced-representation genome sequencing to conduct a phylogenomic assessment of the two dominant mesophotic genera of plating corals in the Indo-Pacific and Western Atlantic, respectively, Leptoseris and Agaricia. While these genome-wide phylogenies broadly corroborated the morphological taxonomy, they also exposed deep divergences within the two genera and undescribed diversity across the current taxonomic species. Five of the eight focal species consisted of at least two sympatric and genetically distinct lineages, which were consistently detected across different methods.

Conclusions: The repeated observation of genetically divergent lineages associated with mesophotic depths highlights that there may be many more mesophotic-specialist coral species than currently acknowledged and that an urgent assessment of this largely unstudied biological diversity is warranted.

Rights

© The Authors 2023.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Data Availability

Article states: "Raw sequence data for reduced-representation (nextRAD) sequencing are available at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject PRJNA970738 [110]."

Link to data as shown in reference 110 (Reduced representation (nextRAD) sequences for several Agaricia and Leptoseris species from the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific. 2023. NCBI BioProject) is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/?term=PRJNA970738.

Original Publication Citation

Gijsbers, J. C., Englebert, N., Prata, K. E., Pichon, M., Dinesen, Z., Brunner, R., Eyal, G., González-Zapata, F. L., Kahng, S. E., Latijnhouwers, K. R. W., Muir, P., Radice, V. Z., Sánchez, J. A., Vermeij, M. J. A., Hoegh-Guldberg, O., Jacobs, S. J., & Bongaerts, P. (2023). Global phylogenomic assessment of Leptoseris and Agaricia reveals substantial undescribed diversity at mesophotic depths. BMC Biology, 21(1), 1-15, Article 147. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-023-01630-1

ORCID

0000-0002-4867-0164 (Radice)

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