The Marine sponge Cinachyrella sp used in this study are commonly found in offshore South Florida and Caribbean waters and appeared to be resilient in closed system aquaculture. Marine sponges host diverse bacterial symbionts that are distinct compared to bacteria found in ambient seawater, however the roles of a large fraction of the bacterial community in marine sponges are unknown. Comparison of symbiotic to aposymbiotic (bacteria-free) sponges could provide information about interactions (metabolic and physiologic) between the bacteria and sponge. In this study, a single Cinachyrella kuekenthali individual was subsectioned into explants (N=240) in order to provide identical bacterial communities to perform comparative studies. Presence of photosymbionts was also analyzed by characterizing bacterial communities from varying light and dark conditions. Tools for characterization included transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and 16S rRNA sequence analysis obtained from Illumina Miseq. High throughput DNA sequencing revealed bacterial taxa belonging to phyla Thaumarchaeota, Chloroflexi, Nitrospira, Acidobacteria and Verrucomicrobia persist in the explants. This study also demonstrated that antibiotics (Ampicillin, Tetracycline, Penicillin-Streptomycin and combination of all) can alter the bacterial community in the marine sponge C. kuekenthali explants in vitro. Bacterial communities of explants treated with different antibiotics were statistically (Unifrac and Bray-Curtis analysis) different from controls (p-value
| Date of Award | Nov 12 2015 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jose V. Lopez (Supervisor), Patricia Blackwelder (Advisor) & Cristina Maria Diaz (Advisor) |
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