Meeting Abstract
Microbiomes can have substantial impacts on the ecological identities and evolutionary histories of their hosts. In the sponge genus Ircinia, evolutionary responses to host-microbial symbioses abound, evidenced through several hallmarks of metabolic integration including microbial genome streamlining, the translocation of nutrients between the microbes and hosts, and the heritability of endosymbionts. Previous work has shown that several incipient Ircinia species from Panama are divergent in the compositions of their microbiomes (2bRAD, 16S rRNA data). However, the ecological ramifications of these microbiome differences are largely unknown due to the inherent limitations of 16S rRNA data and the lack of ecophysiological information for the vast majority of these microbes. Our study sought to fill this gap in knowledge by using shotgun-metagenomic data to delineate the metabolic consequences of Ircinia microbiomes.
