Glowing corals that display a surprising array of colours have been discovered in the deep water reefs of the Red Sea by scientists from the University of Southampton, UK, Tel Aviv University and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine¹ Sciences (IUI), Israel, together with an international team of researchers. The researchers, whose findings have been published online today in research journal PLOS ONE, hope that some of the coral pigments² could be developed into new imaging tools for medical applications.

 

The team studied corals at depths of more than 50 metres and found that many of them glow brightly with fluorescent³ colours, ranging from green over yellow to red. The encounter of such a rainbow of coral colours in deep waters was unexpected, since their shallow-water counterparts in the same reef contain only green fluorescent pigments.

 

Jörg Wiedenmann, Professor of Biological Oceanography and Head of the University of Southampton's Coral Reef Laboratory, explains: "These fluorescent pigments are proteins. When they are illuminated⁴ with blue or ultraviolet light, they give back light of longer wavelengths⁵, such as reds or greens.

 

"Their optical properties potentially make them important tools for biomedical imaging applications, as their fluorescent glow can be used to highlight living cells or cellular⁶ structures of interest under the microscope. They could also be applied⁷ to track cancer cells or as tools to screen for new drugs."

 

Gal⁸ Eyal, PhD candidate at the IUI, says: "Corals from these so-called mesophotic reefs are less well studied since they are beyond the depth limits of standard Scuba⁹ diving techniques. Advances in technical diving have enabled us to explore coral communities from these deeper waters.

 

"Since only the blue parts of the sunlight penetrate¹⁰ to depths greater than 50 metres, we were not expecting to see any red coloration around. To our surprise, we found a number of corals showing an intense green or orange glow. This could only be due to the presence of fluorescent pigments."

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