Professor LERAY, Matthieu

Teaching Areas

• Molecular Ecology
• Conservation Genomics
• Invertebrate Zoology
• Methods in Biodiversity
• Marine Biology

Research Interests

• Coral reef resilience to environmental changes
• Nutrient fluxes in coral reef food webs
• Ecology and evolution of marine symbioses
• Organismal response to environmental changes
• Mechanisms of species co-existence in the Anthropocene
• Environmental DNA for marine conservation

Current Research

• Functional role of herbivores on coral reefs
• Role of micro- and macrobial symbionts in marine host acclimatization
• Gut microbiome function in the face of environmental changes
• Nutritional seascapes and food security
• Diversity and distribution of elasmobranches using eDNA

Research Team

PhD students:

• Natasha Hinojosa
• Laura Lardinois
• Maria Alejandra Sanchez
• Paige Smallman
• Tess Morelli

Fellowships

• 2018    Gordon & Betty Moore foundation
• 2016    Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellowship
• 2013    Smithsonian MarineGEO postdoctoral fellowship
• 2009    Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History shot-term fellowship
• 2008    PhD fellowship, Ministry of education and research of France

Publications and News

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DfhawycAAAAJ&hl=en

(*first author; ^#senior author)

• Clever F*, Preziosi RF, Nguyen B, De Gracia B, Quintero H, McMillan WO, Altieri AH, O'Dea A, Knowlton N, Leray M^#. 2026. Dietary resilience of coral reef fishes to habitat degradation. Journal of Animal Ecology In press
• Pappalardo P*, Hemmi JM, Machida RJ, Leray M, Collins AG, Osborn KJ^#. 2025. Taxon-specific BLAST percent identity thresholds for identification of unknown sequences using metabarcoding. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 16, 2380-2394
• Glynn VM*, Fernandes de Barros Marangoni L, Guglielmetti M, Tapia ER, Ali V, Quintero H, Rodriguez Guerra EC, Yuval M, Kline DI, Leray M^#, Connolly SR^#, Barrett RDH^#. 2025. The role of holobiont composition and environmental history in thermotolerance of Tropical Eastern Pacific corals. Current Biology 35, p3048-3063.e7
• Clever F*, Sourisse JM*, Preziosi RF, Eisen JA, Rodriguez Guerra EC, Scott JJ, Wilkins LGE, Altieri AH, McMillan WO, Leray M^#. 2022. The gut microbiome variability of a butterflyfish increases on severely degraded Caribbean reefs. Communications Biology 5, 770
• Leray M*, Wilkins LGE*, Apprill A, Bik HM, Clever F, Connolly SR, De León ME, Duffy EJ, Ezzat L, Gignoux-Wolfsohn S, Herre EA, Kaye JZ, Kline DI, Kueneman JG, McCormick MK, McMillan OW, O’Dea A, Pereira TJ, Petersen JM, Petticord DJ, Torchin ME, Vega Thurber R, Videvall E, Wcislo WT, Yuen B, Eisen JA^#. 2021. Natural experiments and long-term monitoring are critical to understand and predict marine host-microbe ecology and evolution. PloS Biology 19, e3001322
• Johnson MD*, Scott JJ*, Leray M*, Lucey N*, Bravo LMR, Wied WL, Altieri AH^#. 2021. Rapid ecosystem-scale consequences of acute deoxygenation on aCaribbean coral reef. Nature Communications 12, 1240
• Leray M*, Knowlton N, Ho SL, Nguyen BN, Machida RJ^#. 2019. GenBank is a reliable resource for 21st century biodiversity research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, 22651-22656
• Wilkins LGE*, Leray M*, Yuen B, Peixoto R, Pereira TJ, Bik HM, Coil DA, Duffy JE, Herre EA, Lessios H, Lucey N, Mejia LC, O’Dea A, Rasher DB, Sharp K, Sogin EM, Thacker RW, Vega Thurber R, Wcislo WT, Wilbanks EG, Eisen JA^#. 2019. Host-associated microbiomes drive structure and function of marineecosystems. PLoS Biology 17, e3000533
• Leray M*, Knowlton N^#. 2015. DNA barcoding and metabarcoding of standardized samples reveal patterns of marine benthic diversity. Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, 2076-2081
• Leray M*, Yang JY, Meyer CP, Mills SC, Agudelo N, Ranwez V, Boehm JT, Machida RJ^#. 2013. A new versatile primer set targeting a short fragment of the mitochondrial COI region for metabarcoding metazoan diversity, application for characterizing coral reef fish gut contents. Frontiers in Zoology 10,34