Research

Check out our research video from UNCW:

Stony coral tissue loss disease

My dissertation is mainly focused on the etiology of stony coral tissue loss disease. I am working on trying to decipher which bacteria are involved in disease progression and narrow down the etiological agent. Most of my work is done at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Ft. Pierce, FL.

Transmission Electron Microscopy

I am using transmission electron microscopy to determine the cellular pathology of SCTLD. I am looking at how the disease progresses over time within the ultrastructure of the coral tissue. A bonus of using such a high magnification is that I can also see the presence of viral-like particles (VLPs) in my samples. Since VLPs could be indicated in SCTLD, I am also trying to determine their presence in naive and diseased samples.

Check out our protocol for preparing coral tissue for TEM!

Surrogate Infection Model

Since obtaining access to corals can be difficult due to most of them being endangered, sometimes it is necessary to use an infection system to study disease mechanisms in an animal other than a coral. My surrogate system is Galleria mellonella, the larvae of the greater wax moth. I can inject the larvae with a known concentration of bacteria and measure their mortality.

The video is showing an injection of food coloring, which is not harmful to the larvae.

Bacterial Culturing

I primarily work in a coral microbiology lab. Our work involves a lot of bacterial culturing and testing on various medias. I am working on trying to culture pathogenic bacteria from SCTLD lesions.

Bacterial Pneumonia

I worked in a pulmonology lab at the University of Pittsburgh in 2020. I was mainly working on bacterial pneumonia infections. My work focused on Pseudomonas aeuriginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae hospital acquired infections. I also did A LOT of Western blotting. Check out the publications tab to read about the research I worked on in this lab!

Microfragmentation

While at Mote Marine Lab, I was trying to determine the effect of substrate type on the growth of microfragments of Acropora palmata. This was important because at the time Mote used a commercially bought ceramic tile and a hand-made cement tile for different purposes throughout the restoration process. We wanted to determine which substrate was better for growth overall. Find out more by reading our publication.

The second project I worked on at Mote was determining whether microfragmentation actually increased the growth rate of coral fragments. These results have not been published.