Caribbean yellow band disease compromises the activity of catalase and glutathione S-transferase in the reef-building coral Orbicella faveolata exposed to anthracene

Abstract

Healthy and diseased corals are threatened by different anthropogenic sources, such as pollution, a problem expected to become more severe in the near future. Despite the fact that coastal pollution and coral diseases might represent a serious threat to coral reef health, there is a paucity of controlled experiments showing whether the response of diseased and healthy corals to xenobiotics differs. In this study, we exposed healthy and Caribbean yellow band disease (CYBD)-affected Orbicella faveolata colonies to 3 sublethal concentrations of anthracene to test if enzymatic responses to this hydrocarbon were compromised in CYBD-affected tissues. For this, a 2-factorial fully orthogonal design was used in a controlled laboratory bioassay, using tissue condition (2 levels: apparently healthy and diseased) and pollutant concentration (4 levels: experimental control, 10, 30 and 100 ppb concentration) as fixed factors. A permutation-based ANOVA (PERMANOVA) was used to test the effects of condition and concentration on the specific activity of 3 enzymatic biomarkers: catalase, glutathione S-transferase, and glutathione peroxidase. We found a significant interaction between the concentration of anthracene and the colony condition for catalase (Pseudo-F = 3.84, df = 3, p < 0.05) and glutathione S-transferase (Pseudo-F = 3.29, df = 3, p < 0.05). Moreover, our results indicated that the enzymatic response to anthracene in CYBD-affected tissues was compromised, as the activity of these enzymes decreased 3- to 4-fold compared to healthy tissues. These results suggest that under a potential scenario of increasing hydrocarbon coastal pollution, colonies of O. faveolata affected with CYBD might become more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of chemical pollution.

Cellular adaptations of the scleractinian coral Madracis pharensis to chronic oil pollution in a Mediterranean shipwreck

“…Interestingly, in this study GSTs activity was significantly lower in corals sampled at Car Deck site compared to those sampled at Smokestack, and thus negatively correlated with PAHs in corals tissue; this result is of particular interest when compared to other findings on corals under organic xenobiotic stress: indeed, early induction of GSTs activity has been described in the coral Montastraea faveolata under acute shortterm exposure to 0.1 ppm benzo[a]pyrene for 72h (Ramos and Garcıá, 2007), and similarly GST-pi gene induction was observed in Pocillopora damicornis after 24h under different concentrations of water available fraction of oil (Rougeé et al, 2006). To date, a negative effect on GSTs activity was described in the reef-building coral Orbicella flaveolata affected by the Carribean yellow band disease under anthracene exposure (Montilla et al, 2016), and in the scleractinian P. damicornis exposed to polystyrene microplastics (Tang et al, 2018). The observed inverse relationship between GSTs activity and PAHs in corals tissues allows to hypothesize different possible mechanisms causing the lower activity of this detoxification process.…”

High-Resolution Dynamics of Hydrogen Peroxide on the Surface of Scleractinian Corals in Relation to Photosynthesis and Feeding

“…Quantifying ROS levels in the water surrounding corals provides an indirect, and likely inaccurate, estimate of [H 2 O 2 ] within the coral MBL due to unintended sample dilution and limited temporal resolution of measurements. There is growing recognition of the importance of polyp-scale mechanisms of ROS control in the photobiology and physiology of the coral holobiont to understand coral bleaching, thermal resilience and response to disease (Smith et al, 2005;Mydlarz and Jacobs, 2006;Tchernov et al, 2011;McGinty et al, 2012;Gustafsson et al, 2013Gustafsson et al, , 2014Krueger et al, 2015;Montilla et al, 2016;Baird et al, 2018;Szabó et al, 2020). Therefore, improved in situ sensing technologies are necessary to quantify ROS on live coral polyps with improved temporal and spatial resolutions (Hansel and Diaz, 2021).…”

Steady Decline of Corals and Other Benthic Organisms in the SeaFlower Biosphere Reserve (Southwestern Caribbean)

“…Increased nutrient and sediment load in coastal areas are recognized as major drivers of coral reef deterioration worldwide (Fabricius, 2011;Sherman et al, 2016). In addition, coastal pollution can lead to disturbances in the coral microbiome and disease-related mortality (Klaus et al, 2007;Montilla et al, 2016). Traditional methods to evaluate reef condition do not effectively reflect the current water quality in terms of nutrients, due to a delayed response by the long-lived coral community and the associated costs of long-term monitoring (Cooper et al, 2009).…”