Research Interests

By utilizing a comprehensive range of disciplines including ecology, molecular biology, aquaculture and bioinformatics, I am devoted to investigating and advancing our understanding of how global climate change influences on marine organisms and coastal ecosystems. This includes the impact of global changes on population structure and species microevolution, the physiological and immunological responses, as well as adaptive mechanisms (genetics and epigenetics) organisms employ to cope with environmental changes.

The research aim is to not only map the ecological changes but also to unveil the intrinsic mechanisms underpinning these changes, thereby contributing to the broader scientific and social community's understanding of our changing planet.

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Also see Publications

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Research background

Anthropogenic activities, particularly fossil fuel combustion, have drastically increased atmospheric CO2, exacerbating the greenhouse effect at a global scale. Concurrently, this excess of atmospheric CO2 is altering the carbonate chemistry balance of the ocean, resulting in the decline of the seawater pH, a process referred to as ocean acidification (OA). Such anthropogenic-driven alterations in the chemistry of the ocean have profound functional effects in marine organisms, altering the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of marine biodiversity. To understand these threats it is fundamental to assess not only the biological responses but more importantly, the adaptive potential and the adaptive strategies that marine organisms implement to counteract any potential negative impact within and across generations.

(i) Transgenerational plasticity in sex determination

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I conducted a pioneering transgenerational experiment from 2019 to 2022, using oysters as a model animal. Utilizing this experimental system, a sequence of investigations were executed to examine the transgenerational effects on diverse facets including physiology, reproduction, immunity, population genetics and microevolutionary trajectory. In 2021, an incidental discovery was made revealing that parental exposure to OA resulted in a significantly higher proportion of female offspring (>70%). This finding was the foundation of a hypothesis that was subsequently corroborated through additional experiments. By the end of 2024, I finalized a novel concept of pH-mediated sex determination (PSD) in marine bivalves - a proposition made for the first time in scientific literature, inaugurating a new field to the environmental sex determination (ESD) and highlighting the impacts of global changes on reproduction and population dynamics of marine organisms (Dang et al., 2025). Further investigations have demonstrated that PSD can modulate the sex ratio of a population without significantly affecting reproductive ability. This could be conceptualized as an adaptative mechanism triggered in response to extreme events associated with climate change. Specifically, increasing the number of fertile females could be a strategy to counterbalance an increased larval mortality, thereby maintaining the population size. This important achievement was recognized with some global awards such as Early Career Research Award (2024) from Malacological Society of Australasia, and resulted in many invitations to present at academic conferences across Hong Kong, the United States, Australia, and Malaysia, which has been garnered widely attention and recognition by peers within the scientific community.

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(ii) Epigenetics-assisted adaptative plasticity

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Using the established transgenerational system (Lim et al., 2021), I am investigating the role of DNA methylation in facilitating rapid and inheritable adaptative mechanisms to environmental shifts. Specifically, the laboratory-acclimated populations were undergoing selection by two successive generations of OA, resulting in offspring exhibiting an elevated resistance to OA. This enhanced resilience, preliminary findings suggest, is achieved through the epigenetic modification of DNA methylation sites (accounting for ~15% of total methylation sites) across around 300 related genes, involving multiple functions and pathways, including immunity, energy metabolism, and substance cycling (unpublished data). Likewise, these results were supported by my previous study on the carry-over effects of environmental stressors at molecular and organismal levels, which indicated that environmental perturbations at early developmental stage could induce epigenetic modifications in DNA, consequently affecting downstream gene expression and phenotypic plasticity at later developmental stage (Dang et al., 2022). Overall, epigenetics offers a potential effective and rapid response mechanism enabling organisms to contend with environmental stressors, which is able to bridge different developmental stages within a single generation, while also extending across multiple generations.

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(iii) Host-microbiota interactions

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Climate change (i.e., warming and acidification) has important effects on the intrinsic phenotypic characteristics (i.e., physiology, immune defense and energy reserve) and extended phenotypes (associated microbiota) of many marine organisms. My previous research identified ****a species-specific response to OA highlighted by reduced immune stress (evidenced by a reduction in hemocyte apoptosis) and enhanced survival in an estuarine oyster species compared to their coastal counterparts. The higher immune resistance observed in estuarine species is linked to the homeostasis of associated gut microbes, which are potentially involved in the energy turnover of the host under stress conditions (Dang et al., 2023a). Nevertheless, such immune resistance would be compromised under conditions such as bacterial infections or protozoan pathogen outbreaks, demonstrated by obstruction of multiple immunological processes including pathogen recognition, immune signal transduction and effectors (Dang et al., 2023b). Such disturbances could eventually result in mass mortality events in oysters (Lee et al., 2024), even though OA itself does not directly lead to the death of wild populations5. On the other hand, in a collaborative study, we discovered that giant clam possesses the ability to generate secondary energy by dissolving muscle tissue in response to warming-induced bleaching and loss of symbiosis (under review). These findings underscore the complex interplay between environmental stressors and host responses (physiology and immunology), and the critical role of microbiota in modulating these interactions.

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