Bioinformatics of corals: Investigating heterogeneous omics data from coral holobionts for insight into reef health and resillience

Coral reefs are home to over 2 million species and provide habitat for roughly 25% of all marine animals, but they are being severely threatened by pollution and climate change. A large amount of genomic, transcriptomic and other -omics data from different species of reef building corals, the uni-cellular dinoflagellates, plus the coral microbiome (where corals have possibly the most complex microbiome yet discovered, consisting of over 20,000 different species), is becoming increasingly available for corals. This new data present an opportunity for bioinformatics researchers and computational biologists to contribute to a timely, compelling, and urgent investigation of critical factors that influence reef health and resilience. This paper summarizes the content of the Bioinformatics of Corals workshop, that is being held as part of PSB 2021. It is particularly relevant for this workshop to occur at PSB, given the abundance of and reliance on coral reefs in Hawai^‘i and the conference’s traditional association with the region.