100-word biography: | Professor Zuhong Lu is Director of the State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Southeast University. His background is electronic engineering, and received Ph.D degree of bioelectronics from Southeast University in 1988. He won the distinguished professorship of Cheung Kong Scholars, Ministry of Education of China in 1999. Main researches cover many aspects, such as molecular devices, biosensors, microarray, microfluidic systems, next generation sequencing, and post-genomic technologies for many biological systems (e.g. coral reefs ) etc. He published more than 300 papers and applied more than 30 Chinese patents. |
Abstract: | Coral reefs arebuilt up of large numbers of calcium carbonate skeletons mainly produced byscleractinian corals. They provide a living environment for more than 30% ofmarine animals and plants, and are important to marine material cycles becausethey can affect the physical and ecological conditions of surrounding ocean areas.In recent years, due to global warming, changes in the physicochemicalenvironment of the ocean, and massive encroachment of the predatorycrown-of-thorns starfish (COTS), coral reefs are declining sharply. However, wehave limited knowledge about the biology of coral reefs. Here, wedeveloped do novo sampling method forfour common and frequently dominant reef-building corals ( Pocillopora verrucosa, Acroporamuricata, Montipora foliosa, and Montipora capricomis ), sequenced thegenomes, metagenomes, full-length transcriptomes, proteomes, eukaryoticreference transcriptomes, small RNA, and scRNA-seq , et al. Reef-building coralis a typical marine animal of host-zooxanthellae holobiont, which is a standardheterozygote sample in sequencing technological research. We developed a Canuor Falcon flow path of SMRT sequencing -polished by next-generation sequencing -contig assembling - error correction- expelling intermixture - draining contamination - 10 X genomics - Hi-C - hole filling - blobtools software evaluation.Currently, this strategy is sole method to acquire reef-build coral genome mapof Hi-C and chromosome level. All four coralsare diploid with 14 chromosomes, and phylogenetic analysis of comparative genomeshas been done throughout phylum cnidaria, suggesting that coral reefsand their builders were only developed and expanded during Pliocene Epoch(5.333 to 2.58 Myr), very close to our living Holocene Epoch (before 11,650years to present). Single cell transcriptomics shows that reef-building coralcell atlas have extensive diversity, and cellular molecular basis ofcalicoblasts, alga-hosting cells, cnidocyte, collagen secreting cells, immunecells and neuron are constant and stable. According to macroscopic genomics andtranscriptomics results, most functional gene regulatory networks can beattributed to single cell clusters. Additionally, metagenomics illustratesassociated biota of reef-building corals except symbiont zooxanthellae. Thisstudy will be helpful for future coral-reef ecological restorations. |
