Liza Roger
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Biology
Reef-building corals survive by housing microscopic algae inside their tissue, a partnership that supplies the coral with food. When oceans heat up, this partnership breaks down and the algae are expelled, leaving the coral white, the condition known as coral bleaching.
- Fields
Biology
Biomedical Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
coral bleaching
coral-algal symbiosis
dinoflagellate
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how coral cells and their dinoflagellate algal partners respond to bleaching-level stress, comparing cells in isolation with cells in symbiosis, to separate each partner's contribution to free-radical buildup.
- Fabricate a 3D biohybrid coral model combining a skeleton-mimicking hard base with bioink carrying living coral and algal cells, using 3D printing and bioprinting to control cell type, cell density and tissue architecture.
- Measure nitro-oxidative stress inside cells and in the surrounding bioink at high resolution using nanoprobes and advanced microscopy under conditions spanning normal and bleaching-associated stress.
- Link free-radical dynamics to cellular state and tissue microenvironment by combining gene expression profiling, metabolomics, material characterization and computational modeling of the biohybrid model.
More about the research
Mass bleaching events are getting more frequent and more severe, yet the cellular chain of events that causes the breakdown is still poorly described. A leading suspect is the buildup of free radicals, highly reactive molecules that are harmful at high doses. This collaborative project examines how these reactive nitrogen and oxygen species accumulate and move between coral and algal cells under stress.
Why it matters
Coral reefs support fisheries, coastal protection and tourism, and are being lost to repeated bleaching. Pinning down how reactive free radicals accumulate and pass between coral and its algal partner would identify what actually tips the symbiosis into collapse, information that could guide reef conservation choices and engineered interventions. The biohybrid coral model also offers a controllable test platform for stress experiments that are hard to run on living reefs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Benjamin Glass
Boston University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Profile temperature, oxygen and other abiotic conditions at a Bermuda coral reef to define realistic stress scenarios.
Randi Rotjan
Tufts University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Measure how symbiotic state, from nearly algae-free white colonies to algae-rich brown ones, affects reproductive investment in the Northern Star Coral Astrangia poculata.
Carly Kenkel
University of Southern California, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether differences in staghorn coral shape plasticity are driven by changes in calcification and fine-scale skeletal deposition, using a lab water-flow experiment on clonal replicates of Acropora cervicornis genotypes.
The school
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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