Sarah Tanja’s Open Lab Notebook - Montipora capitata

Author

Sarah Tanja

Modified

October 23, 2025

https://github.com/sarahtanja/coral-pae-temp

This project was a multiple-stressor mesocosm experiment I conducted in August 2022 at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in Kaneohe Bay.

In this experiment, I exposed coral fragments to a chemical mix of 6 common phthalate pollutants in methanol and thermal stress for 48 hours. Unfortunately, in this pilot experiment, we lack a methanol solvent control. This means that we cannot differentiate the effects of the phthalate pollutants from the effects of the methanol on the microbial community changes when compared to the no-pollution controls.

However, this project and the data can be used as a ‘practice set’ for developing microbiome analysis pipelines and figures.

Since the phthalates are confounded with methanol, the treatments can be re-characterized as ‘chemical pollution exposure’ versus a ‘control’.

The data and code files for this project are organized on GitHub at [https://github.com/sarahtanja/coral-pae-temp]

Date	Title	Categories	Reading Time
April 25, 2023	Dual DNA & RNA Extractions for Montipora capitata coral	lab records	25 min

---
title: "Montipora capitata "
subtitle: "Microbial community changes in Montipora capitata corals under EPA506 Phthalates Mix and thermal stress exposures"
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:::: {#description}
<div>

This project was a multiple-stressor mesocosm experiment I conducted in August 2022 at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in Kaneohe Bay.

</div>

In this experiment, I exposed coral fragments to a chemical mix of 6 common phthalate pollutants in methanol and thermal stress for 48 hours. **Unfortunately, in this pilot experiment, we lack a methanol solvent control. This means that we cannot differentiate the effects of the phthalate pollutants from the effects of the methanol on the microbial community changes when compared to the no-pollution controls.**

However, this project and the data can be used as a 'practice set' for developing microbiome analysis pipelines and figures.

Since the phthalates are confounded with methanol, the treatments can be re-characterized as 'chemical pollution exposure' versus a 'control'.

The data and code files for this project are organized on GitHub at \[https://github.com/sarahtanja/coral-pae-temp\]
::::