Could stem cell transplants save the world's corals?

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Ben-Gurion University researchers and colleagues demonstrate feasibility​

Climate change is bleaching and killing off vast amounts of the world's coral due to rising sea temperatures. Dr. Benyamin Rosental of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his colleagues have proposed an out of the box potential solution – transplanting stem cells from resilient individuals to revive them.

In a new paper published recently in Cell Reports, Dr. Rosental and Shani Talice and the rest of his team establish for the first time the feasibility of transplanting stem cells in sea anemones, which are closely related to corals. They determined that stem cells from the Hexacorallian, Nematostella vectensis did integrate, differentiate and proliferate in transplanted individuals.

Building on recent studies seeming to indicate that Hexacorallia have stem cells, Dr. Rosental and his team developed a unique method to isolate and implant stem cells. Their isolation method is applicable to other fields as well.

“The basic idea is to develop cellular therapy for corals, along the lines of “Bone Marrow Transplantation” in humans. In humans we transplant bone marrow from a healthy individual to a recipient with severe immune deficiency in order to restore the immune system through the blood stem cells, which reside in the bone marrow. In corals, for instance, the idea would be to take stem cells from a heat resilient individual to a sensitive one to transfer resilience in the face of heat waves,” explains Dr. Rosental.

Dr. Rosental is a member of The Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics in the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cells at BGU. Researchers from BGU's Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change also took part.

He collaborated with researchers from the University of Miami, Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant no. 202-011), Revive and Restore grant (no. 2020-011) and an NSF-BSF Integrative and Organismal Systems grant (BSF grant no. 2019647, NSF grant no. 1951826), Alex and Ann Lauterbach, the Israel Science Foundation (Grant nos. 1416/19 and 2841/19) and an HFSP grant (RGY0085/2019).

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