Transcriptomic responses of Mediterranean sponges upon encounter with symbiont microbial consortia

13 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, supplementary material https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-024-10548-z.-- Data availability: The raw reads, metadata, transcriptome assembly and full annotation for this study have been deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI under the accession number PRJEB61959 (ERP147040)

Sponges (phylum Porifera) constantly interact with microbes. They graze on microbes from the water column by filter-feeding and they harbor symbiotic partners within their bodies. In experimental setups, sponges take up symbionts at lower rates compared with seawater microbes. This suggests that sponges have the capacity to differentiate between microbes and preferentially graze in non-symbiotic microbes, although the underlying mechanisms of discrimination are still poorly understood. Genomic studies showed that, compared to other animal groups, sponges present an extended repertoire of immune receptors, in particular NLRs, SRCRs, and GPCRs, and a handful of experiments showed that sponges regulate the expression of these receptors upon encounter with microbial elicitors. We hypothesize that sponges may rely on differential expression of their diverse repertoire of poriferan immune receptors to sense different microbial consortia while filter-feeding. To test this, we characterized the transcriptomic response of two sponge species, Aplysina aerophoba and Dysidea avara, upon incubation with microbial consortia extracted from A. aerophoba in comparison with incubation with seawater microbes. The sponges were sampled after 1 h, 3 h, and 5 h for RNA-Seq differential gene expression analysis

LP received supported by “la Caixa” Foundation (ID 10010434), co-financed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847648), fellowship code is 104855. LP and MR received additional institutional support by the “Severo-Ochoa Centre of Excellence” accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) funded by AEI 10.13039/501100011033. This is a contribution from the Marine Biogeochemistry and Global Change research group (Grant 2021SGR00430, Generalitat de Catalunya). UH was supported by the DFG (“Origin and Function of Metaorganisms”, CRC1182-TP B01) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (“Symbiosis in Aquatic Systems Initiative”, GBMF9352). Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature

Peer reviewed