A short LSU rRNA fragment as a standard marker for integrative taxonomy in calcareous sponges (Porifera: Calcarea)
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A short LSU rRNA fragment as a standard marker for integrative taxonomy in calcareous sponges (Porifera: Calcarea) Oliver Voigt 1 & Gert Wörheide 1,2,3
Received: 9 August 2015 / Accepted: 11 November 2015 / Published online: 25 November 2015 # Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik 2015
Abstract Calcareous sponges are taxonomically difficult, and their morpho-systematic classification often conflicts with molecular phylogenies. Consequently, species descriptions that rely solely on morphological characters,and taxonomic revisions appear to provide little to no information about phylogenetic affiliations and integrative approaches, combining DNA and morphological data, are applied more frequently. However, a standardized database that combines DNA sequence and morphological specimen information is still missing for calcareous sponges. The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 gene (COI) is the marker of choice for rapid species identification in many other animal taxa, including demosponges, for which COI sequences and morphological information have been compiled in the sponge barcoding database (www.spongebarcoding.org). But due to the peculiarities of calcarean mitochondrial genomes, sequencing COI in Calcarea is methodologically challenging. We here propose the use of one more commonly used DNA marker, the C-region of the 28S gene (LSU), as standard barcoding marker for Calcarea, after also
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13127-015-0247-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Oliver Voigt [email protected] 1
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Richard-Wagner-Str. 10, 80333 Munich, Germany
2
Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Richard-Wagner-Str. 10, 80333 Munich, Germany
3
GeoBio-Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Richard-Wagner-Str. 10, 80333 Munich, Germany
considering the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region for such proposes. Especially in the subclass Calcaronea, we observed severe problems of high intra- and intergenomic variation that impedes pan-calcarean ITS alignments. In contrast, the C-region of LSU provides a short but phylogenetically informative DNA sequence, alignable across both subclasses with the help of a newly developed secondary structure and which also can be used to address exemplary taxonomic questions. With our work, we start to close the gap of Calcarea in the sponge barcoding project (www.spongebarcoding.org) and provide a resource for biodiversity studies and potentially for DNA-guided species identification. Keywords Integrative taxonomy . Calcareous sponges . DNA-barcode . LSU rRNA . Sponge barcoding database
Introduction DNA and/or amino acid sequence analyses have contributed much in the last decades to address questions concerning the systematics of sponges. For instance, the monophyly of sponges was corroborated and novel class-level relationships were inferred by phyl
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