Rivera-García, Liajay

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    Comparative transcriptomics of the two distinct morphologies of the Caribbean octocoral Briareum asbestinum (Pallas, 1766)
    (2019-05-15) Rivera-García, Liajay; Schizas, Nikolaos V.; College of Arts and Sciences - Sciences; Majeske, Audrey; Weil, Ernesto J; Department of Marine Sciences; Grove, Kurt A
    Briareum asbestinum (Pallas, 1766) seems to be the only Caribbean species in the genus Briareum, with four additional species found in the Indo-pacific region. Since the 1970’s, interest from pharmaceutical companies to isolate chemicals from Briareum colonies for potential human use led to further investigations of its defense mechanisms and distribution. As in many other octocoral taxa exhibiting diverse morphologies, B. asbestinum has been plagued by taxonomic uncertainty. The two common morphotypes, a digitate form and a crustose form (B. polyanthes), have been previously reported as separated species. Recent reports however, lump them together into one species. Furthermore, the use of single molecular markers have led to inconclusive results, failing to resolve the ambiguous taxonomic status of the two morphs of B. asbestinum. We used new genomic tools (i.e. transcriptomes) to explore and solve the taxonomic status of the two morphotypes found across the southwest coast of Puerto Rico. We used a multi-assembly approach implemented in the NCGAS pipeline. The gene ontology analysis was performed using Trinotate, and genes were categorized by molecular functions, biological processes, and cellular components. The phylogenetic analysis was performed using distinct custom bash programs to select homologous sequences among the transcriptomes, resulting in 2,568 homologous sequences. The concatenation analysis (with traditional Maximum Likelihood) resulted in a topology supporting a clade of B. asbestinum shallow species, while the octocoral Heliopora coerulea was used as the outgroup. Coalescence-based tree estimation analysis (using RAxML-NG and ASTRAL-II), resulted in a similar topological structure as the concatenated approach. The phylogenetic results showed no significant differences between the two B. asbestinum morphotypes, but close genetic similarities, which together with recent molecular results seem to indicate the presence of a single species in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.