Can Genetic Engineering Save Coral Reefs?

Global warming is decimating the world's reefs. Watching that happen to Australia's Great Barrier Reef has transformed Madaleine Van Oppen, a coral geneticist at the University of Melbourne, into a leading advocate of something that was considered radical until recently: creating breeds of coral that can withstand warmer water.

Van Oppen and her colleagues are re-engineering corals with techniques as old as the domestication of plants and as new as the latest gene-editing tools. A feature story in Science explains how Van Oppen and the team of researchers she's leading at the National Sea Simulator in Townsville are busy cross-breeding corals in tanks in a rush to find a solution to the annihilation of the world's largest reef system, just 50 miles offshore. Their efforts have helped make Australia, which recently committed AUS$300 million to coral research and restoration, a global magnet for reef scientists.

Read about Van Oppen's efforts in this most interesting profile at www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/researchers-embrace-radical-idea-engineering-coral-cope-climate-change