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Remote scientific collaborations have been pivotal in generating scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that accelerate research in many fields. Emerging VR applications for remote work, which utilize commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs), offer the promise to enhance collaboration, through spatial and embodied experiences. However, there is little evidence on how professionals in general, and scientists in particular, could use existing commercial VR applications to support their cognitive and creative collaborative processes while exploring real-world data as part of day-to-day collaborative work. In this paper, we present findings from an empirical study with 14 coral reef scientists, examining how they chose to utilize available resources in existing virtual environments for their ongoing data-driven collaborative research. We shed light on scientists’ data organization practices, identify affordances unique to VR for supporting cognition in a collaborative setting, and highlight design requirements for supporting cognitive and creative collaboration processes in future tools. 

Abstract The application of established cell viability assays such as the commonly used trypan blue staining method to coral cells is not straightforward due to different culture parameters and different cellular features specific to mammalian cells compared to marine invertebrates. UsingPocillopora damicornisas a model, we characterized the autofluorescence and tested different fluorescent dye pair combinations to identify alternative viability indicators. The cytotoxicity of different representative molecules, namely small organic molecules, proteins and nanoparticles (NP), was measured after 24 h of exposure using the fluorescent dye pair Hoechst 33342 and SYTOX orange. Our results show that this dye pair can be distinctly measured in the presence of fluorescent proteins plus chlorophyll.P. damicorniscells exposed for 24 h to Triton-X100, insulin or titanium dioxide (TiO₂) NPs, respectively, at concentrations ranging from 0.5 to 100 µg/mL, revealed a LC50 of 0.46 µg/mL for Triton-X100, 6.21 µg/mL for TiO₂NPs and 33.9 µg/mL for insulin. This work presents the approach used to customize dye pairs for membrane integrity-based cell viability assays considering the species- and genotype-specific autofluorescence of scleractinian corals, namely: endogenous fluorescence characterization followed by the selection of dyes that do not overlap with endogenous signals.