Coral Reefs to benefit from UTS Early Career Research funding
18 January 2013
Three Plant Functional Biology and Climate Change Cluster (C3) Early Career Researchers (ECR) have been recognised for innovative climate change projects, focussing on coral reef health, with the announcement of the 2013 UTS ECR Grants . The grants provide promising young researchers with UTS funding to further their research development.
Dr Daniel Nielsen and Dr Katherina Petrou will be studying coral bleaching, one cell at a time, by building the first-ever live-imaging micro-fluidic chamber system that will expose coral cells to controlled environmental conditions such as high light, temperature and water chemistry.
“There is an urgent need to understand the response and resilience of coral reef ecosystems, like the Great Barrier Reef, if we hope to better manage them under climate change and other environmental stresses,” the researchers said.
Daniel and Katherina will use the chamber system to look at microscale processes that occur during bleaching and will also test the novel coral bleaching hypothesis that symbiont (algae) expulsion from coral is caused by water stress.
“Although coral bleaching is well studied at the colony level, it is at the cellular level where bleaching occurs. This system will allow us to study, for the first time, the coral-symbiont relationship in real-time and provide a better understanding of cellular responses prior to, and during, the actual bleaching event,” Daniel and Katherina said.
Coral reef health is also the focus of Dr Olivier Laczka’s ECRG which supports the development of a new rapid diagnostic tool that targets a bio-marker of cell death in animal cells.
“Current coral health monitoring protocols are inadequate and fail to assess coral health in real time,” Olivier said.
The innovative biosensing technology developed during this project will detect the early stages of coral cell death allowing the development of management strategies to minimise further coral stress.
“This new biosensor will improve current coral health assessment protocols that will, ultimately, safeguard the health of our coral reefs,” Olivier said.
UTS ECR Grants are competitive. The projects will be funded for two years, commencing 2013.
Daniel, Katherina and Olivier are all members of the C3 Aquatic Processes Group.