Collaborative Project: A workshop addressing comparative genomic approaches to understanding the evolutionary ecology of corals and other basal metazoans.

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To help accelerate our understanding of corals and their relation to more basal and derived taxa, a workshop will be held at Rutgers University in the winter 2014. This workshop will focus on improving the annotation of a draft genome for the Red Sea coral, Stylophora pistillata, coupled with a comparative analysis with more basal and derived taxa. The goal of the workshop is to finalize the annotation of the genome of the widely used model coral. Workshop participants, international in scope, would also compare coral genomes, provide a genomic reference data base for the research community, and allow analyses of functional genomic models of coral metabolism, biomineralization, evolution, and development. The effort has both basic and applied science components. The basic components are related to understanding the evolutionary ecology of corals and their relationship to other basal animals. The applied components are related to the sensitivity of corals to global climate change related stressors including thermal stress and ocean acidification.Scleractinian corals are the architects of a threatened ecosystem that are highly valued culturally, biologically and economically. Genomic resources for this important taxonomic group are only now beginning to emerge and this workshop will advance the framework required to interpret genomic data and provide open access to genomic data, an activity that will build significant research capacity for the field of coral reef science. In addition to a peer reviewed publication summarizing the conclusion of the investigations, data will be disseminated broadly in a referenced and interpretable database of coral genomes that will serve scientists, educators, managers, conservation personnel and the lay community via a web portal. In terms of training, two postdoctoral fellows and a graduate student will be responsible for the detailed organization of the workshop. This experience will allow them to understand how to develop cooperative efforts in the scientific community as part of their mentoring plan and provide networking opportunities with the very diverse group of workshop participants that will be important in their career development.