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Everyone knows coral bleaching occurs when seawater gets hot. Biochemists ask: How?

Corals die when their photosynthetic algal symbionts experience heat stress and exude hydrogen peroxide, causing coral tissue to expel the algae. Thus, coral bleaching is a biochemical process that we can understand and engage with, imagining new solutions to climate changes that degrade our planet.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long embraced “One Health,” the concept that a healthy planet is required for human health. Recently, the National Institutes of Health launched their Climate Change and Health Initiative. Biochemistry is central to preserving the natural world and developing fully renewable building materials, novel foods and health care solutions.

This session will explore how the living world experiences changes in temperature, pH, salt, nutrients, desiccation and other conditions. The speakers will illuminate the cell and molecular mechanisms underlying coral symbiosis, thermal adaptations of marine organisms, temperature-dependent mutagenesis and transposition in the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, and the endocrine underpinnings of environmental influences on human health. This session is for the next generation of biochemists who will meet the climate challenge.

Keywords: One Health, thermal adaptation, symbiosis.

Who should attend: The next generation of biochemists who will save the planet.

Theme song: by John Lennon

This session is powered by the courage to face humanity’s greatest challenge.

Biochemistry and climate change

Asiya Gusa, Duke University 

James A. DeMayo, University of Colorado–Denver

Yixian Zheng, Carnegie Institution for Science

Teresa Horton, Northwestern University