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Marine sponge holobionts, defined as filter-feeding sponge hosts together with their associated microbiomes, are prolific sources of natural products. The inventory of natural products that have been isolated from marine sponges is extensive. Here, using untargeted mass spectrometry, we demonstrate that sponges harbor a far greater diversity of low-abundance natural products that have evaded discovery. While these low-abundance natural products may not be feasible to isolate, insights into their chemical structures can be gleaned by careful curation of mass fragmentation spectra. Sponges are also some of the most complex, multi-organismal holobiont communities in the oceans. We overlay sponge metabolomes with their microbiome structures and detailed metagenomic characterization to discover candidate gene clusters that encode production of sponge-derived natural products. The multi-omic profiling strategy for sponges that we describe here enables quantitative comparison of sponge metabolomes and microbiomes to address, among other questions, the ecological relevance of sponge natural products and for the phylochemical assignment of previously undescribed sponge identities.
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This content will become publicly available on October 27, 2026
A Common Garden of Halichondria Sponges: Taxonomic Revision of Northeast Pacific Halichondriidae Reveals Many Cryptic Introduced Species
Sponges (phylum Porifera) possess biochemical, cellular, and physiological traits with valuable biotechnical applications. However, our ability to harness these natural innovations is limited by a classification system that does not fully reflect their evolutionary history. In this study, we uncover numerous cryptic species within the genus Halichondria that are morphologically indistinguishable from the well-known Ha. panicea. Many of these species have habitat preferences and geographic distributions that strongly suggest they have been dispersed by human activity. Most of these species are broadly sympatric with their closest relatives, and these overlapping distributions allow us to use patterns of DNA variation to infer reproductive isolation between clades in nature. With reproductively isolated species thus delineated, we can use DNA states as taxonomic characters to formally describe them. Though much remains to be learned about these newly discovered species, the natural “common gardens” of these sponges in California, New York, and other locations provide opportunities to test hypotheses about their diversification in future work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025121
- PAR ID:
- 10651269
- Publisher / Repository:
- Society of Systematic Biologists
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2768-0819
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Porifera Halichondria phylogeny classification
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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