Fungi found in Mediterranean and North Sea sponges: How specific are they?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Marine Biology, Microbiology, Mycology
- Keywords
- marine sponge, fungi, yeast, Malasseziales, symbiosis
- Copyright
- © 2017 Naim et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Fungi found in Mediterranean and North Sea sponges: How specific are they? PeerJ Preprints 5:e3049v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3049v1
Abstract
Fungi and other eukaryotes represent one of the last frontiers of microbial diversity in the sponge holobiont. In this study we employed pyrosequencing of 18S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons containing the V7 and V8 hypervariable regions to explore the fungal diversity of seven sponge species from the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. For most sponges, fungi were present at a low relative abundance averaging 0.75% of the 18S rRNA gene reads. In total, 44 fungal OTUs (operational taxonomic units) were detected in sponges, and 28 of these OTUs were also found in seawater. Twenty-two of the sponge-associated OTUs were identified as yeasts (mainly Malasseziales), representing 84% of the fungal reads. Several OTUs were related to fungal sequences previously retrieved from other sponges, but all OTUs were also related to fungi from other biological sources, such as seawater, sediments, lakes and anaerobic digesters. Therefore our data, supported by currently available data, point into the direction of mostly accidental presence of fungi in sponges and do not support the existence of a sponge-specific fungal community.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
List of barcode sequences and ERS accession numbers used in this study
Sample codes indicate H. panicea (P1-P3), H. xena (X1-X3), S. massa (M1-M3), P. ficiformis (F1-F3), A. aerophoba (A1-A3), A. damicornis (D1-D3), A. verrucosa (V1-V3) and sea water (WNS & WMS).
Blastn query at 11-Jan-2017 of selected representative OTUs with highest number of sponge (Porifera) reads from pyrosequencing data against the non-redundant nucleotide database
BLASTn of OTUs 514, 392 and 404 representative sequence against the NCBI nr/nt database
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) ordinations of fungal communities in the different sponge hosts and seawaters
Only samples with more than 10 fungal reads were included. Plots are based on square root transformed relative abundance data of OTUs (A) or presence-absence data (B). The percentage of total variation that is explained by each PCo axis is given in the parentheses.