Sponge associated biodiversity in variable North Sea habitats

Motivation:

Marine sponges are prevalent inhabitants of the North Sea and play an important role in the ecosystem. Sponges provide three-dimensional structure and can serve as hosts to a variety of marine life. These animals use sponges as substrate to lay eggs on, as a food source, or as shelter, living within the channels of their aquiferous system. However, our knowledge of the interactions between sponges and their associated fauna remains limited, and most of these ecological interactions are poorly understood. Improved understanding of these relationships will allow for more focussed efforts to preserve biodiversity in a system under pressure.

Aim & objectives/research questions:

This study aims to increase the understanding of the ecology of sponge associated communities in the North Sea. Additionally, this study is focussed on developing and validating novel molecular and bioinformatics approaches to study sponge associated fauna.

• Characterizing sponge associated faunal communities of distinct North Sea sponge species to acquiring understanding in how these communities are structured by different sponge hosts.
• Developing a method to retrieve long, highly accurate genetic barcodes from mixed communities.
• Improving and expanding DNA databases for species identification by developing methods to retrieve complete mitochondrial genomes from sponge associated fauna.
• Investigating how environmental conditions affect sponge associated faunal community composition.
• Evaluating the direct and indirect relevance of sponges as a substrate or habitat for North Sea biodiversity.

Methodology:

During this research new molecular genetics methods will be developed to accurately identify sponge associated macro- and meiofauna. With Oxford Nanopore sequencing genetic information will be retrieved to assemble complete mitochondrial genomes. The molecular approach will be combined with classification by expert taxonomists to verify the findings, overcome database