How come marine biologist still unable to treat STN/RTN for more then a decade?

[transformer999]

Till date...

They cant really figure whats the real reason behind it?

Harder to find a treatment for RTN/STN compare to Human
complicated cancer cells.?

[Steveb]

lol.. Not sure this even deserves a comment but having had 3 family members with cancer I can tell you that they don't have it all figured out.

[billsreef]

There are typically a number of different things involved in several coral diseases, often leading to the same visual symptoms. Coral diseases also tend to be more frequent at higher temps...despite the known disease microbes still being present at cooler temps. Leads to speculation (work is still being done on this subject) that coral immunity to these microbes drops with rising temps (stress), or possibly microbe growing increases at those higher temps to a point it overwhelms the coral. The higher temp stress on the corals is a leading theory. The areas typically the hardest hit are indeed seeing higher and more prolonged periods of time with high temperatures than in the past when these issues were not common.

[Fishbulb2]

OK, I'll bite.

I'm a researcher myself. I study neurobiology or how the nervous systems of animal's work. My specialty is electrophysiology, which basically means directly measuring a neuron's electrical activity. My niche is neuroethology, or how do these electrical signals give rise to behavior in animals. In order to even have a chance at studying these things we first had to learn how to even record from such cells. That started in the 50's but progressed really slowly. We were first recording from one cell per animal at a time, and only from animals with neurons that were several hundred microns to a millimeter in diameter (think large Aplysia). In this early era too, all analysis was done by hand and signals were captured by triggering oscilloscopes and taking pictures of the screen with a polaroid camera. Once that was done, it took a long time to develop things like analytical and mathematical techniques to analyze all of this data. Nowadays, we can record from hundreds of cells at once, but determining what all of that data means is another feat. Basically, my small field took decades to develop because electrical recording methods had to come online, microscopy had to advanced, genetic approaches became readily available, computing became more powerful, and human ingenuity also developed. None of it happened at once (and it's still ongoing).

Studying coral diseases first requires being able to EASILY cultivate them in a lab setting so that you can isolate single variables. It needs to be so simple that graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are never limited by corals to study and they can focus on the questions at hand. How long ago did that happen? Probably 30 years ago we would never have had a chance to run a real coral lab. Now some Universities are attempting it. But still, probably less than a decade of real laboratory research on the topic. Then you need the molecular and genetic revolutions to come into play so that you can determine what is really happening to the animal under attack. Few coral genomes have been sequenced and I doubt RNA or proteome libraries have really been constructed for any substantial amount of corals. Finally as Bill mentioned, if we think that climatology has an impact on these diseases, well that field needed to mature as well (think how far satellite technology has come in the last 50 years).

Honestly, as someone who's devoted their entire life to lab sciences I can tell you it's not surprising at all that these things take time. Lots of time. Scientific progress is best measured in decades at least and never years. Also, we are at an interesting point now where things are actually moving even faster thanks to technology (computing and such) and the molecular revolution. You have no idea how much slower things progressed 500 years ago.

FB


Oh and yeah, cancer is a bad analogy. Most of your medical treatments for the time being are based on trial and error with clinical trials validating what works and what doesn't. Most drugs are the products of chemical screens meaning thousands of candidates are tested, and a couple appear promising. It's no where near as if we new exactly what we were targeting and then developed one drug to do it. Some drugs that work and help with chronic diseases are even discovered by accident as off label use or don't even have an known target. Yes science is both simultaneously amazing and utterly disappointing at times.

[jdegrasse]

In addition to FB's great point. Science takes time and money. Lots of money.

And marine sciences are notoriously underfunded.

[mgraf]

I would definately go along with the whole money thing.

[Fishbulb2]

Money is of course a huge factor but look at autism, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. We have dumped obscene amounts of money into those three diseases. Absolutely insane amounts of money and no cures and no known causes for at least two of them. All the money in the world won't cure those diseases in few short short years. Time is probably more important than money. Time buys you advances in parallel industries that you can mooch off of.

Not trying to argue, just my opinion :-)

[zachfishman]

Coming from a lab in which one of our fellow students is working directly on RTN in Caribbean staghorn coral...

Currently, the thinking is that RTN results from a pathogen, since the disease has been successfully transferred between colonies of Caribbean Acropora.

The single, greatest hindrance to figuring this out is the sheer number and variability in the microbial communities which live in/on corals. Even just investigating the associated microbiota of one coral, Acropora cervicornis, proves immensely difficult due to the sheer number of different bacteria that live on it. These communities also change bewteen regions, seasons, and even between neighboring colonies. Add to this the high cost and complexity of DNA sequencing, and you can see why we (unfortunately) haven't figured RTN out yet.

I agree that stress has a role (as with most diseases). Just like RTN we hobbyists see in SPS such as birdsnest coral, RTN is typically observed in the inner regions of staghorn colonies where flow is relatively lower than in outer colony regions. And since water flow has been demonstrated to mitigate stress in corals, I'm assuming a link.

[disc1]

I think a large part of the problem is that STN and RTN aren't really diseases. They are symptoms. A great many things may cause a coral to go downhill. I would doubt that there is one single cause or cure.

It's less like cancer and more like headaches. We can't cure headaches. Why? Why is there not a pill I can take and never have another one? Because headache is a symptom and not a disease. For one person it's a migraine. For another it's sinuses. For me, it's stress. No one cure is going to cover all of those.

[Fishbulb2]

I think a large part of the problem is that STN and RTN aren't really diseases. They are symptoms. A great many things may cause a coral to go downhill. I would doubt that there is one single cause or cure.

It's less like cancer and more like headaches. We can't cure headaches. Why? Why is there not a pill I can take and never have another one? Because headache is a symptom and not a disease. For one person it's a migraine. For another it's sinuses. For me, it's stress. No one cure is going to cover all of those.

Great point. Which would also explain why it might seem to have a bacterial origin in one group's hands and an environmental (climate change) origin in another groups.

[acroman]

Exactly! These are symptoms that can be caused by multiple stressors, or exacerbated by a combination of many.
A healthy coral in clean, cool water with good flow has a much better chance of beating a bacterial infection than one in turbid, warm, stagnant water. Also, the health of the existing good bacteria may go a long ways toward out-competing infections.

Also, funding for marine science is nowhere even remotely close to medical research funding, nor is there an easily recognizable monetary payback for doing most marine research (so therefore a lack of commercial/corporate funding.)