Symbiosis is a driving force of evolution and fundamental to the functioning of all ecosystems. Understanding in detail the manner in which symbiotic relationships function is not only a new scientific frontier, but also of great importance to medical and environmental sciences, because change may perturb these relationships, with important consequences.
Reefs based on scleractinian corals are among the most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. At the heart of their success as the architects of coral reefs is their symbiosis with dinoflagellate algae, which live within their tissues and provide corals with an enlarged metabolic repertoire. Despite clear evidence that reef-building corals can exchange nutrients with their dinoflagellate symbionts, the dynamics and precise roles played by host and symbionts in this fundamental process remain unclear.
In this talk, I will present recent advances in combining isotopic labelling and high resolution imaging in order to track the dynamics of nutrients incorporation within the intact symbiosis between reef-building corals and dinoflagellate symbionts. The methods and results open up a new interdisciplinary frontier for the exploration of dynamics and spatial patterns associated with metabolic activities in microbial symbiosis at a single cell level.