Coral Reefs: A Hidden Source of Future Medicines and Biotech Breakthroughs

Coral reefs may hold the key to unlocking the next generation of medicines and biotechnology breakthroughs, according to a recent study published in Nature. Researchers have discovered a vast array of previously unknown bioactive metabolites—small biomolecules with the potential to drive drug development and industrial applications.

“There’s a huge treasure trove of genomic potential,” says Rebecca Vega Thurber, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and coauthor of the study. Thurber, who directs UCSB’s Marine Science Institute, was part of the 2016–2018 Tara Pacific expedition, a two-year global research voyage that explored the coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean.

The expedition team studied 32 archipelagos and collected 58,000 samples, making it the largest-scale research effort to examine these fragile ecosystems. “The mission was to try to characterize the total biodiversity that existed on these pretty unexplored reefs and open water systems,” Thurber explains.

The research focused on the coral reef microbiome—the diverse microorganisms living in and around corals. Thurber’s team specifically investigated bacteria associated with these reefs. “In the past, a lot of people looked at bacteria associated with the water, and there’s a lot of really interesting biodiversity associated with the water bacteria, but no one had really taken a deep dive into coral-specific bacteria,” she says.

Using a genomic approach, the researchers analyzed bacteria from two types of stony coral and one type of fire coral. Fire corals are colonial marine organisms more closely related to jellyfish than to stony corals. The team reconstructed more than 13,000 metagenome-assembled microbial genomes from reef-building coral samples collected during the expedition.

“Ninety percent of what we found had never been found before,” Thurber notes. “That’s a total of 3,700 new bacteria we discovered through this approach.” She adds that virtually all of these newly discovered bacteria were specific to their coral hosts and not found in the surrounding water.

This discovery opens a wealth of possibilities for synthesizing important products from the bioactive molecules these bacteria produce. These small compounds, which bacteria use for growth, communication, defense, and adaptation, could be repurposed for medical, industrial, and biotechnological applications. “They can be used for drugs, or for industrial purposes,” Thurber says. “They could be used in laundry detergents, or in the development of concrete, for example. If you’re developing new biotechnology materials, these biomolecules are really important for allowing scientists to create new synthetic products.”

Among the newly identified bacteria were new groups of Acidobacteriota, a versatile bacterial group known for encoding previously unknown enzymology. These discoveries could play a promising role in protein engineering. Additionally, the team found that the biosynthetic potential of reef-building coral microbiomes rivaled or even surpassed that of sponges—a well-known source of bioactive metabolites. While sponges have long been a primary focus for bioactive product discovery, corals are now emerging as a critical frontier in biotechnology.