Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Suez Canal University, Egypt.
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Suez Canal University, Egypt.
Mar Genomics. 2023 Aug;70:101032. doi: 10.1016/j.margen.2023.101032. Epub 2023 Apr 19.
Marine sponges associated microorganisms are considered to be prolific source of bioactive natural products. Omics-based techniques such as metagenomics and metatranscriptomics have been used as effective tools to discover natural products. In this study, we used integrated metagenomic and metatranscriptomic analysis of three samples of the Egyptian Red Sea sponge Theonella sp. microbiome to obtain a complete picture of its biosynthetic activity to produce bioactive compounds. Our data revealed high biodiversity of the Egyptian sponge microbiota represented by 38 bacterial phyla with Candidate Phylum Poribacteria as the most abundant phyla with an average of 27.5% of the microbial community. The analysis also revealed high biosynthetic activity of the sponge microbiome through detecting different types of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) with predicted antibacterial, cytotoxic and inhibitory bioactivity and the majority of these clusters were found to be actively transcribed. The complete BGCs of the cytotoxic theonellamide and misakinolide were detected and found to be actively transcribed. The majority of the detected BGCs were predicted to be novel as they did not show any similarity with any known cluster in the MIBiG database.
海洋海绵共生微生物被认为是生物活性天然产物的丰富来源。基于组学的技术，如宏基因组学和宏转录组学，已被用作发现天然产物的有效工具。在这项研究中，我们对来自埃及红海海绵 Theonella sp. 的三个样本的微生物组进行了综合宏基因组学和宏转录组学分析，以全面了解其生物合成活性，从而产生生物活性化合物。我们的数据显示，埃及海绵微生物群具有高度的生物多样性，代表了 38 个细菌门，候选门 Poribacteria 是最丰富的门，平均占微生物群落的 27.5%。通过检测不同类型的生物合成基因簇 (BGCs)，分析还揭示了海绵微生物组的高生物合成活性，这些 BGCs 具有预测的抗菌、细胞毒性和抑制活性，其中大多数簇被发现是活跃转录的。检测到细胞毒性的 Theonellamide 和 Misakinolide 的完整 BGCs，并发现它们是活跃转录的。大多数检测到的 BGCs 被预测为新的，因为它们与 MIBiG 数据库中任何已知的簇都没有相似性。
