Together stronger: Intracolonial genetic variability occurrence in Pocillopora corals suggests potential benefits. Issue 12 (5th June 2020) - Oury, Nicolas
Abstract: We investigated the occurrence of intracolonial genetic variability (IGV) in Pocillopora corals in the southwestern Indian Ocean. Ninety‐six colonies were threefold‐sampled from three sites in Reunion Island. Nubbins were genotyped using 13 microsatellite loci, and their multilocus genotypes compared. Over 50% of the colonies presented at least two different genotypes among their three nubbins, and IGV was found abundant in all sites (from 36.7% to 58.1%). To define the threshold distinguishing mosaicism from chimerism, we developed a new method based on different evolution models by computing the number of different alleles for the infinite allele model (IAM) and the Bruvo's distance for the stepwise mutation model (SMM). Colonies were considered as chimeras if their nubbins differed from more than four alleles and if the pairwise Bruvo's distance was higher than 0.12. Thus 80% of the IGV colonies were mosaics and 20% chimeras (representing almost 10% of the total sampling). IGV seems widespread in scleractinians and beyond the disabilities of this phenomenon reported in several studies, it should also bring benefits. Next steps are to identify these benefits and to understand processes leading to IGV, as well as factors influencing them. Abstract : We investigated the occurrence of intracolonial genetic variability (IGV) in Pocillopora corals in the southwestern Indian Ocean. We then developed a new method based on different evolution models to identify mosaic and chimeric colonies. Over 50% of the colonies presented at least two different genotypes, and the majority (80%) were mosaics. This suggests that IGV should be beneficial for genetically heterogeneous colonies.