A sponge bath the fun-gi deserves

Sponges are a filter feeding, stationary organism that can be found in a wide range of marine habitats. They can harbour a wide range of microbes which may account for up to 40% of the sponge tissue. One of these microbes is filamentous fungi which play a role in carbon and nutrient recycling in the environment.

Passarini et al. (2013) aimed to taxonomically rank filamentous fungi found on the sponge Dragmacidon reticulatum to assess the fungal diversity. To achieve this they collected samples from the along the coast of Brazil, from which samples of internal tissue were removed and grown on a medium to isolate the fungi present. The genetic material was then extracted and amplified, from then Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation mass spectrometry was used to spectrally identify and sequence the genetic material. In total they isolated 98 different filamentous fungi from two samples of D. reticulatum, noting 64 distinct fingerprints amongst 24 genera.

I think this paper is useful in identifying what organisms can live inside sponges, and also shows how using a polyphasic approach is useful when it comes to identifying species, but I think the paper has a few draw backs. Firstly is the poor grammar, there are multiple sentences that don’t make sense simply because they haven’t proof read the paper correctly. Secondly is the use of the term ‘prokaryotic’, it was 1977 when the three domain system was first proposed and I think that almost 40 years later scientists that are getting papers published really should be using the current terminology. In the introduction that marine derived fungi and bacteria may have significant biotechnological uses, but that is almost the last they say if it, the word biotechnology is not mentioned again and they rarely allude to it in discussion. They also mention nothing about why these fungi are living inside the sponge and do not hint towards any relationship there may be, whether it symbiotic or parasitic.

Referenced paper:

Passarini M.R., Santos C., Lima N., Berlinck R.G. and Sette L.D., (2013). Filamentous fungi from the Atlantic marine sponge Dragmacidon reticulatum. Archives of microbiology. 195(2). pp.99-111.