西太平洋海山深海八放珊瑚形态及分子系统发育研究

Western Pacific Ocean plays a key role on our national strategy of ocean development---“From coastal to deep”. Seamounts spreading all over there are rich of cobalt-rich crusts which become potential strategic reserve resources. As the ecology and environment problems caused by resource exploiting processes in international maritime space draw more and more attention of international society, investigations and researches on biological environment baseline of seamounts are imperative. Corals are major dominant species in seamount communities. Research on corals is also a major component of investigation on seamount environment. In this study, we choose octocoral sampled from western pacific seamount as materials to carry on a multidiscipline research including method of morphology, molecular phylogeny and bioinformatics. We reconstruct phylogeny relationship of coral specimen based on mitochondria genome and nuclear genes as molecular markers and morphologic characters, compare the phylogeny trees obtained by different methods, evaluate the resolution and suitability of molecular markers and their combinations on species identification and phylogeny reconstructing and finally discuss the similarities and differences of coral phylogenies drawing by morphologic characters and molecular markers respectively. This work will enhance our understanding of the evolution history of octocoral and pave the way on research of seamount coral diversity, connectivity and geographic distribution pattern in future.

西太平洋是我国实施由浅海向深海发展战略的必经之路，其上星罗棋布的海山蕴藏的丰富的富钴结壳资源亦是具有潜力的战略储备资源。随着国际社会对国际海域海底资源开发引发的生态环境问题的关注，对海山的生物环境基线的调查研究也势在必行。珊瑚是海山巨型底栖生物的主要优势种，对珊瑚的研究将是海山环境调查的重要组成部分。本研究拟以西太平洋海山采集的八放珊瑚为研究对象，综合形态学，分子系统学，生物信息学等多种方法，通过对珊瑚线粒体基因，核基因等分子标记以及形态学特征的解析，构建珊瑚的系统发育关系，并对多种手段得到的结果进行比较，对分子标记及其组合在鉴定物种和构建分子系统关系的适用性和分辨能力做出评价，探讨分子与形态两种方法对珊瑚系统发育关系的不同解读，加深我们对八放珊瑚演化历程的认识，为未来海山珊瑚多样性、连通性以及地理分布的研究提供重要基础。