Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1093/jhered/esaf010

Publication Title

Journal of Heredity

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

29 pp.

Abstract

Coral mortality is occurring worldwide at an alarming rate. Despite the immense and underestimated biodiversity of reef-building corals, very few genomes are available. Further, almost all genomic resources originate from shallow water corals even though photosynthetic, symbiotic corals occur at mesophotic depths deeper than 30 m and even >100 m. We present annotated, de novo genomes for two mesophotic, scleractinian (reef-building) corals Montipora cf. grisea and Leptoseris cf. scabra from American Sāmoa, the latter being the first genome for the widespread genus Leptoseris. We used PacBio continuous long reads and Omni-C data to assemble chromosome-level reference genomes. For Montipora cf. grisea, the final genome size was 1.3 Gb with a completeness level (BUSCO) of 99.9% and 97.2% against the eukaryotic and metazoan databases, respectively. The M. cf. grisea genome had a N50 of 50.2 Mb and the annotation predicted 41,981 genes. For Leptoseris cf. scabra, the final genome size was 794 Mb with a BUSCO of 99.2% and 96.1% against the eukaryotic and metazoan databases, respectively. The L. cf. scabra genome had a N50 of 45.2 Mb and 35,741 predicted genes. These genomes serve as critical references for the analysis of coral gene expression responses to climate change such as ocean warming (i.e., coral bleaching) and ocean acidification impacts. The genomes can be used to investigate the genetic diversity and adaptive divergence of shallow vs. mesophotic coral populations to understand reef resilience and guide conservation strategies.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "Full genome scaffolds, predicted genes, peptide sequences, functional annotations, masked repeats, and visualization of select gene structures are available in the Open Science Framework (Radice & Barshis 2024; https://osf.io/kdm8f/). Raw genomic data and GenBank-edited genome assemblies (required fltering) are available in the NCBI GenBank BioProject PRJNA1149836. This Whole Genome Shotgun project has been deposited at DDBJ/ENA/GenBank under the accessions JBHEPV000000000 (Leptoseris cf. scabra) and JBHOHN000000000 (Montipora cf. grisea)."

Original Publication Citation

Radice, V. Z., Gijsbers, J. C., Vimercati, S., & Barshis, D. J. (2025). First reference genomes for two mesophotic, reef-building coral species: Leptoseris cf. scabra and Montipora cf. grisea. Journal of Heredity. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esaf010

ORCID

0000-0003-1510-8375 (Barshis)

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