The persistence of reef building corals is heavily dependent on their associated endosymbiotic assemblages of Symbiodinium. Corals span a gradient of symbiotic flexibility, from generalists to specifists and attributes of the symbiosis are considered to be a driving forces of coral performance under environmental stress. Here, we tested the hypothesis that increasing in situ thermal variance would result in changes in symbiotic communities, and change would be dissimilar between a symbiotic generalist coral, Acropora hyacinthus and specifist corals, massive Porites sp. We applied Roche 454 FLX sequencing of the ITS2 region (nrDNA) to ascertain Symbiodinium assemblage identity and similarity across coral species and temperature regimes. This sequencing approach exponentially increased our sampling depth, and identified the presence of clades A, C, D.
Corals were collected from 6 different sites (n=10 fragments per species per site, with 2 missing total=58 samples). These sites were monitored with in situ water temperature loggers and provide a gradient of daily tempeature fluctuation.
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58 samples were seqeunced and fasta files are in /Bioinf