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Melanin as defense

Posted by evaamsen on 01 Apr 2008 at 22:22 GMT

I don't really know anything about sea fan corals, but I found your paper while looking for general recent melanin papers -- I study melanogenesis in mouse cell lines -- and am just trying to get a general idea about the function of melanin in different species.

Two questions, one general, one a little more specific:

1. It seems that in these Sea Fan Corals the physical melanin barrier is part of the defense mechanism against fungal infections, is that correct? Or is the production of melanin a side effect of other immune response reactions?

2. Do you see an increase in melanin production or melanosome number in amoebocytes after experimentally induced fungal infections as well, or only in the collected samples? If not, over what time scale have you studied the induced samples?