Lecture
This Week’s Discoveries | 16 October 2018
- Date
- 16 October 2018
- Time
- Address
- Oort
Niels Bohrweg 2
2333 CA Leiden - Room
- De Sitterzaal
Lecture
Title
The sponge specific microbiome or is everything everywhere after all?
Speaker
Nicole de Voogd ( Naturalis and CML)
Nicole is a marine biologist at Naturalis. Starting May this year, she is also professor by special appointment of “Global change and marine ecosystems” at CML. Her research mainly focuses on tropical marine ecosystems. She combines disciplines such as systematics, ecology, phylogeny, chemical ecology, microbiology and biogeography.
Abstract
The prokaryote communities of sponges (phylum Porifera), which, despite the constant influx of seawater containing microorganisms, are able to sustain a dense and diverse, yet ‘sponge-specific’, symbiotic community, which can comprise up to 35% of sponge biomass.
Much recent marine microbial research has focused on the sponge microbiome, but very little is known about the greater coral reef microbial metacommunity. In this talk, I will present an extensive survey of a wide range of host-related biotopes from coral reef environments. I will show that microorganisms are shared among many coral reef associated hosts, and the sponge prokaryote community is not as diverse and sponge-specific as previously thought.