Paper Title
Diversity and Distribution of Coral-Associated Bacteria Collected From the Gulf of Oman

Abstract
The global continued decline in coral reefs heightens the necessity to understand the coral’s response to local environmental stressors. Corals associated bacterial communities have been suggested as a swift response to environmental pollutants. This study aims to determine the variation of the bacterial communities associated with the mucus Stylophorapistillata and the surrounding seawater exposed to contamination at the Gulf of Oman. Coralswere collected from six sites (Bandar Alkheran, Darsset, Ras Elhad, Sohar, Alqurayat, andSur). The bacterial communities associated with coral mucus were quantified by conventional morphological and biochemical tests as well as a molecular approach(16S rRNA gene sequence). The average number of bacteria in the mucus of S. pistillata ranged from 104to 108 CFU/ml. Sixteen different bacterial isolates were isolated from the mucus of the studied corals. Sixteen pure bacterial cultures were isolated from corals collected from six different sites (Bandar Alkheran, Darsset, Sohar, Ras Elhad, Alqurayat and Sur). The bacterial isolates were identified based on partial 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. Taxonomic identification was performed using BLAST (NCBI) to align sequences to the NCBI 16S BLAST database. All sequences have been deposited in GenBank and accession numbers were obtained. Evolutionary analysis of the sequences was conducted in MEGA11.