Compositional and Quantitative Insights Into Bacterial and Archaeal Communities of South Pacific Deep-Sea Sponges (Demospongiae and Hexactinellida)

Abstract

In the present study, we profiled bacterial and archaeal communities from 13 phylogenetically diverse deep-sea sponge species (Demospongiae and Hexactinellida) from the South Pacific by 16S rRNA-gene amplicon sequencing. Additionally, the associated bacteria and archaea were quantified by real-time qPCR. Our results show that bacterial communities from the deep-sea sponges are mostly host-species specific similar to what has been observed for shallow-water demosponges. The archaeal deep-sea sponge community structures are different from the bacterial community structures in that they are almost completely dominated by a single family, which are the ammonia-oxidizing genera within the Nitrosopumilaceae. Remarkably, the archaeal communities are mostly specific to individual sponges (rather than sponge-species), and this observation applies to both hexactinellids and demosponges. Finally, archaeal 16s gene numbers, as detected by quantitative real-time PCR, were up to three orders of magnitude higher than in shallow-water sponges, highlighting the importance of the archaea for deep-sea sponges in general.

Microbial Strategies for Survival in the Glass Sponge Vazella pourtalesii

“…Formerly placed within the Thaumarchaeota , the Crenarchaeota are well known and widespread sponge symbionts ( 48 – 51 ). Different genera have recently been observed in South Pacific Hexactinellida and Demospongiae ( 14 ). Nanoarchaeota and Patescibacteria also have recently been noticed as members of sponge microbial communities, including glass sponges, but no sponge-associated nanoarchaeal genome has been studied to date, and, likely due to their low abundance in other sponge species, patescibacterial genomes have not been studied in detail ( 14 , 52 , 53 ).…”

“…In fact, microorganisms have rarely been seen in glass sponges (12). However, a recent study of South Pacific sponge microbial communities has shown that general patterns seen previously in shallow-water sponge microbiomes, such as host specificity and low microbial abundance-high microbial abundance dichotomy, are generally applicable for these deep-sea sponge microbiomes as well, including those of glass sponges (14). Another study underlined the importance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (family Nitrosopumilaceae, phylum Thaumarchaeota) in the deep-sea hexactinellid Lophophysema eversa using metagenomic data (15).…”

Genomic Insights Into the Lifestyles of Thaumarchaeota Inside Sponges

“…Bacteria usually dominate sponge microbial communities, but archaea are regularly found in sponge hosts and can make up substantial parts of the community (e.g., 24% of the microbial community in the Great Barrier reef sponge Ianthella basta ) ( Moeller et al, 2019 ), and in some cases even dominate the communities (e.g., up to 63% in the microbial community of the sponge Axinella mexicana ) ( Preston et al, 1996 ). A comparison of the archaeal sponge community from hosts living in shallow waters and the deep-sea indicated that sponge-associated archaea appear to be much more abundant (up to three orders of magnitude greater) in the deep-sea ( Steinert et al, 2020 ). Most archaeal sponge symbionts are Thaumarchaeota, with some belonging to sponge-specific clades ( Simister et al, 2012 ).…”

Microbial diversity of the glass sponge Vazella pourtalesii in response to anthropogenic activities

“…'metaorganism' (Bosch and McFall-Ngai 2011)) has been defined to cover the host plus its associated microbiota (Bordenstein and Theis 2015;Rohwer et al 2002). While the histology and trophic ecology of glass sponges has been a matter of several previous studies (Kahn and Leys 2017;Kahn et al 2018), the microbiology of glass sponges still remains largely unexplored (but see Steinert et al 2020;Tian et al 2016;Savoca et al 2019).…”