Peeling back the layers of coral holobiont multi-omics data

Amanda Williams; Timothy G Stephens; Alexander Shumaker; Debashish Bhattacharya

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107623

Peeling back the layers of coral holobiont multi-omics data

iScience. 2023 Aug 14;26(9):107623. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107623. eCollection 2023 Sep 15.

Authors

Amanda Williams^{1

2}, Timothy G Stephens², Alexander Shumaker^{1

2}, Debashish Bhattacharya²

Affiliations

¹ Microbial Biology Graduate Program, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
² Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.

Abstract

The integration of multiple 'omics' datasets is a promising avenue for answering many important and challenging questions in biology, particularly those relating to complex ecological systems. Although multi-omics was developed using data from model organisms with significant prior knowledge and resources, its application to non-model organisms, such as coral holobionts, is less clear-cut. We explore, in the emerging rice coral model Montipora capitata, the intersection of holobiont transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and microbiome amplicon data and investigate how well they correlate under high temperature treatment. Using a typical thermal stress regime, we show that transcriptomic and proteomic data broadly capture the stress response of the coral, whereas the metabolome and microbiome datasets show patterns that likely reflect stochastic and homeostatic processes associated with each sample. These results provide a framework for interpreting multi-omics data generated from non-model systems, particularly those with complex biotic interactions among microbial partners.

Keywords: Biological sciences; Natural sciences; Omics.