The Bhattacharya lab is visiting the most eastern part of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean – Punta Cana. We are working with the Punta Cana Foundation under a Marine innovation grant that was given to us as collaborators to develop and test tools for understanding the basis of coral resilience and potentially the basis of diseases that are problems for the local corals.
During this visit, we are going to be looking at corals that are impacted by yellow band disease and by Stony coral tissue loss disease and we’re also going to be looking at the corals that are in the nurseries and we’re gathering some of the samples which are being preserved here to be taken back to Rutgers.
And then we’re going to apply a number of omics tools such as metabolomics. And proteomics try to understand first the potential cause of the diseases that are a problem in this region and secondly, to identify genetic markers that may be confer resilience to corals that would make them really good candidates for outplanting in the local breeding program.
