Developing broadly transferable tools to culture, manipulate, and engineer symbiotic algae, enabling restoration in California and Palau.
Clams will serve as a case study to source dinoflagellate algae.
Team & Partners: Drs. Bo Wang & Stephen Palumbi (Stanford), Dr. Nate Cira (Cornell), Palau International Coral Reef Center
Challenge: Photosymbiotic invertebrates are collapsing as oceans warm, but a barrier to intervention is that most symbiotic algae can’t be cultured ex hospite.
Approach: Deploy the SPOTs microfluidic platform (screening 1,000+ culture conditions simultaneously) and nanostraw electro-transformation for gene delivery to establish axenic cultures and genetic tools for symbiotic algae, validated and deployed to giant clams in Palau and anemones in California.
Anticipated outcomes: A scalable, open-source pipeline for culturing and genetically engineering symbiotic algae across diverse host systems, with proof-of-concept field applications in clam and anemone restoration.
