Loretta Roberson

Associate Scientist, Eugene Bell Center for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering, Marine Biological Laboratory

https://www.mbl.edu/research/faculty-and-whitman-scientists/Loretta%20Roberson

Primary Interests:

Loretta Roberson is interested in how organisms respond to anthropogenic impacts on coastal marine systems as well as ways to help mitigate or reduce those impacts. As more and more people move to coastal areas and global processes influence local conditions, more pressure is placed on these systems, often with devastating results like the global coral bleaching event in 2016.  The Roberson Lab at the MBL has two main focus areas: (1) use of macroalgae as biomass for sustainable biofuel production and bioremediation and (2) understanding the mechanisms of calcification in corals.

Laissue PP, Roberson L, Gu Y, Qian C, Smith DJ. Long-term imaging of the photosensitive, reef-building coral Acropora muricata using light-sheet illumination. Sci Rep. 2020 Jun 25;10(1):10369. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC7316744. 

Sánchez-García MA, Zottoli SJ, Roberson LM. Hypoxia has a lasting effect on fast-startle behavior of the tropical fish Haemulon plumieri. Biol Bull. 2019 Aug;237(1):48-62. PubMedPMID: 31441698. 

Toledo-Hernández C, Ruiz-Diaz CP, Díaz-Vázquez LM, Santiago-Cárdenas V, Rosario-Berrios DN, García-Almedina DM, Roberson LM. Comparison of chemical compounds associated with sclerites from healthy and diseased sea fan corals (Gorgonia ventalina). PeerJ. 2017;5:e3677. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5572935.

Mansour TA, Rosenthal JJ, Brown CT, Roberson LM. Transcriptome of the Caribbean stony coral Porites astreoides from three developmental stages. Gigascience. 2016 Aug 2;5(1):33. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4969664.