Carbon and Nitrogen Metabolism of Sponge Microbiome

Abstract

Sponges represent an evolutionarily divergent group of species with widespread physiological and ecological traits. Spongology has grown into a discipline attracting a progressively growing population of hundreds of scientists across the world. Sponges host complex communities of microbial symbionts and thus are ideal model to test functional equivalence and evolutionary convergence that exists in complex symbiont communities across phylogenetically divergent hosts. Many studies have demonstrated the tremendous advances in our understanding of the composition and phylogenetic diversity of sponge-associated microbes. As a comparison, the in situ activity and function of these microbes has become a major research focus. Already the rewards of this new emphasis are evident, with cultivation-independent genomic and experimental approaches yielding novel insights into symbiont function. Herein, this review highlights the largest part of the available knowledge on recent developments about the sponge-meditated nutrient fluxes and their ecological implications of carbon and nitrogen. Gene, genome, transcriptome, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) analyses have provided extraordinary insights into the sponge microbial functions as well as the ecological roles. This review has covered the recent findings regarding dynamics of sponge microbiome, and several interesting research areas, that we believe are deserving of increased attention.