New DNA techniques are being used to understand how coral reacted to the end of the last ice age in order to better predict how they will cope with current changes to the climate.
October 12, 2022
New DNA techniques are being used to understand how coral reacted to the end of the last ice age in order to better predict how they will cope with current changes to the climate.
James Cook University’s Dr. Ira Cooke was senior author of the study. He said when corals become stressed they often bleach and die, but not all corals experience stress equally.
“This is often due to genetic differences between species, but it’s usually very difficult to determine which genes are responsible. In situations where the differences evolved relatively recently—thousands, not millions of years ago—it’s much easier to do so,” said Dr. Cooke.
He said the end of the last ice age is relatively recent in evolutionary terms and it sometimes forced corals to adapt to stresses similar to those projected under future climate change.
“Until now it hasn’t been possible to look at this period in coral evolution because most of the techniques available have provided information about much older events. But by sequencing the whole genomes of many individuals within a single species we have now been able to access this crucial period of coral evolutionary history,” said Dr.
