Coral Tissue Engineering for Mass-Production of Coral for the Recreational Marine Aquarium Trade

Over 10 million coral specimens a year are traded in the +$100 million/year ornamental-recreational aquaria industry. Over ninety percent of commercial coral specimens come from some form of mass harvesting of wild corals from coral reefs. This can have a detrimental impact to coral reefs. We have invented a method of perpetual propagation of corals through tissue engineering. Hundreds to thousands of microscopic tissue explants are generated from a single coral polyp. These explants can be induced to undergo “remorphogenesis” and develop into primary coral polyps and colonization. In Phase I, it’s proposed to optimize this technology for mass-production and to augment cryo-preservation methods to control production rates. Culture media and environmental conditions will be tested for optimal productivity. Phase II will expand this technology to a wide-range of coral species, and to establish a DNA “fingerprint” system to certify specimens that are tissue-engineered vs. wild-collected specimens.