Postdoctoral Fellow in Assisted Evolution in Corals

Our current research was featured in Extreme E's new YouTube series (Ep 02). We describe the challenges Red Sea corals are facing due to climate change and explore how our research here at KAUST is contributing to the knowledge of coral resilience to increasing ocean temperatures.

Dinoflagellate endosymbionts of cauliflower coral The image shows a fluorescence microscopy close-up of polyps of the cauliflower coral Stylophora pistillata and their dinoflagellate endosymbionts. The coral host exhibits green fluorescence due to natural GFP expression, and the symbiotic Symbiodinium microadriaticum dinoflagellates are visible because of their red fluorescence from excited chlorophyll.

Aranda lab graduate Xin Wang identified that coral ancestors had the genetic toolkit to make skeletal structures and only took simple evolutionary steps to begin building reefs.

New publication from Aranda group about the weird and wonderful genome of dinoflagellates. It looks nothing like other eukaryotic genomes.

A new publication titled "Temperature transcends partner specificity in the symbiosis establishment of a cnidarian" was published in 'THE ISME Journal'. This was part of thesis work done by Marcela Herrera, a Ph.D student from our lab.

Click here to read !

​Our lab has just published a paper in Nature Climate Change, detailing the transmission of epigenetic information from corals to their progeny. This work, involving Yi Jin (co-first), Xin and Mani (sole PI), sequenced and analysed DNA methylation patterns from eight corals across three developmental stages.

Documentary "Climate change: Could Red Sea corals save the world’s reefs?" by Alexis Barbier-Bouvet and this team featuring our lab's research published on France24

Maha Cziesielski came to KAUST in 2014 as an intern in the Coral Symbiomics lab. During her internship she worked on the cnidarian symbiosis model system, the small sea anemone Aiptasia. Like corals, Aiptasia lives in symbiosis with the algae Symbiodiniaceae. She quickly developed an interest for the fine tuned and highly complex molecular mechanisms that underlie cnidarian symbiosis. Thus, she returned to KAUST in 2015 to begin her PhD studies.

The KAUST Research Conference: "Securing a Future for Red Sea Ecosystems" brings together experts from academia, industry and government to discuss the current state of research and to develop feasible strategies to improve current mitigation and restoration methods. This event aims to produce a set of targeted strategies that are sustainable, socioeconomically acceptable and aligned with public, academic, industry, and government interests.

Aranda Lab presents at the ALSO conference in Puerto Rico recent studies in epigenetics and assisted evolution.

It's a week of graduation celebrations at Aranda Lab !!. As many as five students graduated this year from our lab, successfully stepping into next stage of their career! Smiles all around :-)

Post-doctoral fellow Arun Prasanna and Prof. Manuel Aranda won research funding through “Competitive Research Grant (CRG)” starting 2019.

Thesis title: Unravelling the metabolic interactions of the Aiptasia-Symbiodiniaceae symbiosis.

Diving into the Red Sea Research with Céline Cousteau

Assistant Professor Manuel Aranda from @RSRC_KAUST will be one of the panelists at the Sci-Café event on the theme of Extreme Marine Environments. Watch live on our KAUST Official Facebook page on Wednesday, October 17 at 4:00pm.

She presented her work on epigenetics, particularly histone modifications, and how this knowledge can aid us in training corals to have higher thermal resilience.

Manuel Aranda, a marine scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia and the author of two studies published in June and August in the journal Science Advances, thinks the first warming event activates genes that prime the coral to cope with the next round of heat stress.

Wang Xin defended his thesis with presentation focussing on "How corals got bone -- comparative genomics reveals the evolution of coral calcification"

The chapter is called: For a World without Boundaries: Connectivity between marine tropical ecosystems in times of change. It is focused on understanding climate change impacts such as rising sea levels, acidifcation and temperature on mangroves, seagrasses and coral reefs. We then discuss how these three ecosystems are connected and hence, a downfall in one will lead to loss and degradation in another.