Abstract
Sponges are primitive metazoans that are known to harbour diverse and abundant microbes. All over the world attempts are being made to exploit these microbes for their biotechnological potential to produce, bioactive compounds and antimicrobial peptides. However, the majority of the studies are focussed on the marine sponges and studies on the freshwater sponges have been neglected so far. To increase our understanding of the microbial community structure of freshwater sponges, microbiota of two fresh water sponges namely, Eunapius carteri and Corvospongilla lapidosa is explored for the first time using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology. Overall the microbial composition of these sponges comprises of 14 phyla and on an average, more than 2900 OTUs were obtained from C. lapidosa while E. carteri showed 980 OTUs which is higher than OTUs obtained in the marine sponges. Thus, our study showed that, fresh water sponges also posses highly diverse microbial community than previously thought and it is distinct from the marine sponge microbiota. The present study also revealed that microbial community structure of both the sponges is significantly different from each other and their respective water samples. In the present study, we have detected many bacterial lineages belonging to Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Planctomycetes, etc. that are known to produce compounds of biotechnological importance. Overall, this study gives insight into the microbial composition of the freshwater sponges which is highly diverse and needs to be studied further to exploit their biotechnological capabilities.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13568-016-0211-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Sponges are one of the most primitive organisms that lack definitive tissue grade organisation
The highest number of OTUs was observed in sponge collected from Pashan lake (PSPO) (2947 ± 269), water collected from Pashan lake (PWAT) (2629 ± 427), water collected from Talegaon lake (TWAT) (2502 ± 84) followed by sponge collected from Talegaon lake (TSPO) (987 ± 34)
Sample TSPO was dominated by Firmicutes followed by Proteobacteria, Cyanobacteria while PSPO was dominated by Proteobacteria followed by Planctomycetes, Cyanobacteria and Actinobacteria
Summary
Sponges are one of the most primitive organisms that lack definitive tissue grade organisation. Studies have suggested that even freshwater sponges are associated with diverse bacterial species (Gernert et al 2005; Costa et al 2012; Kaluzhnaya et al 2012; KellerCosta et al 2014) They are known to produce bioactive compounds such as Syriacin (Rezanka et al 2006) lipids, sterols, etc. A study by Keller-Costa et al (2014) showed, antimicrobial activity of various Pseudomonas species isolated from fresh water sponge, Ephydatia fluviatilis indicating their biotechnological potential Despite their important role in aquatic ecosystems, potential biotechnological and commercial use, studies on the exploration of the microbial community of the freshwater sponges are rare
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