[All-postdocs] Reminder: Bioseminar today - Despoina Konstantinou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

[Margot McKlveen]

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*Biology Department Virtual Seminar*

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Thursday, December 10 at Noon **

*Zoom link: 
https://whoi-edu.zoom.us/j/97250250846?pwd=UGlIY3hNbWVvOXJHby9CYzd0UXFkZz09*

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Despoina Konstantinou, MSc, PhD candidate

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece


Sponge-cyanobacteria Associations in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea; a 
Culture‐dependent Approach

The evolutionary and ecological success of sponges is thought to be 
related to their capacity to host highly diverse and complex communities 
of microbial symbionts. Cyanobacteria are among the most dominant and 
important sponge symbionts, and their association with sponges has 
attracted research interest from an ecological, evolutionary, and 
biotechnological perspective. Our current knowledge for their diversity, 
ecology and functioning is limited to few uncultivated taxa, while a 
great part is “hidden” in metagenomics research studying the entire 
microbial communities of sponges. The present study aimed to explore 
sponge-cyanobacteria associations in a previously unexplored eastern 
Mediterranean ecoregion, the Aegean Sea, by a culture-dependent 
approach. This culture-dependent approach resulted in the isolation of 
15 sponge-associated cyanobacterial strains from 12 sponge species. 
Molecular, morphological and ecological data were obtained in order to 
characterize the sponge-associated cyanobacterial strains. The analyses 
of these data resulted in the description of six new genera and eleven 
new species inside Cyanobacteria Phylum. The considerable number of 
novel taxa characterized in this study highlighted the importance of 
employing polyphasic culture-dependent approaches in order to reveal the 
true sponge-associated cyanobacterial diversity. Further, the 
sponge‐associated cyanobacterial strains were assessed for their 
potential to produce bioactive compounds and found to be promising. In 
order to better understand the biology of sponge-associated 
cyanobacteria, two draft genomes of the most promising sponge-associated 
strains were sequenced, and a comparative genomic analysis was 
performed. Genome hallmarks for a symbiotic lifestyle were revealed 
(such as evidence of genome reduction and detection of genes encoding 
for eukaryotic-like proteins). Genome-mining analysis revealed natural 
product biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in sponge-associated 
cyanobacterial genomes, suggesting that these strains deserve to be 
further explored to reveal novel natural products.


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-- 
Margot McKlveen | she/her
Senior Administrative Assistant
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Redfield Building Room 305 | MS 32
266 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543
508-289-2334
mmcklveen at whoi.edu

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