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Reef-building corals can withstand a small degree of warming, scientists say in a study that relied on bioinformatic analysis with supercomputers. This study, with polyps of staghorn coral (Acropora millepora) across the Great Barrier Reef, found the first evidence that coral pass heat-tolerant genes to their offspring, which can possibly allow a reef to beat the heat.
The Lonestar supercomputer, housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, played a large role in enabling this analysis. The research team dived through terabytes of sequencing data to fish out pearls, tolerance-associated genes, using global gene expression analysis and quantitative trait loci mapping. To get them required genotyping of the entire coral genome individually in more than 300 tiny coral larvae.Image credit: M. Matz, UT Austin
