C. The role of coral pigmentation in the biology of corals.
Our growing understanding of the molecular mechanism associated with coral bleaching has led us to examine the reasons for the bright colour patterns of reef-building corals, which increase during light and temperature stress. Our studies (Takabayashi and Hoegh-Guldberg 1995, Dove et al. 1995, Salih et al 1997a,b) have revealed that pigments colours function as a protective layer against excess Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) levels which appear to aggravate photoinhibition. They also appear to increase, as predicted from our Photoinhibitory model (see A.), during coral bleaching. We have pursued the molecular structure of these compounds with a high degree of success. In 1995, isolated the pink and blue pigments of corals and discovered a novel pigment (which we named "pocilloporin", Dove et al. 1995). We now have the complete 3-D structure of this compound. We have isolated this compound from 5 families of corals and have sequenced the first 30 amino acids of the N terminus. We have pulled the full-length sequence out of cDNA libraries
