Published August 25, 2017 | Version v1
Journal article Open

First records of Geodia demosponges from the New England seamounts, an opportunity to test the use of DNA mini-barcodes on museum specimens

  • 1. Division of Pharmacognosy, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, BioMedical Center, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; Department of Organismal Biology, Program in Systematic Biology, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
  • 2. Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, USA

Description

We report the first records of the sponge genus Geodia (Demospongiae, Tetractinellida, Geodiidae) from the New England Seamounts and Muir Seamount, at lower bathyal depths. Nine specimens collected between 2000 and 2005 belong to two boreal species (Geodia macandrewii and Geodia barretti) and a temperate species (Geodia megastrella). These records extend the distributions of these deep-sea amphi-Atlantic species to the west. Most of these specimens were originally fixed in formalin, which substantially degraded the DNA. We nonetheless managed to sequence two cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) mini-barcodes: the universal mini-barcode at the 5′ end of the Folmer barcode (130 bp) and a newly proposed mini-barcode at the 3′ end of the Folmer barcode (296 bp). These mini-barcodes unambiguously confirmed our identifications. As an additional test, we also successfully sequenced these two mini-barcodes from the holotype of G. barretti, collected in 1855. We conclude by advocating the use of mini-barcodes on formalin-fixed or old specimens with degraded DNA.

Notes

Many thanks to Eric A. Lazo-Wasem (senior collections manager, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History) for sharing this material, for his diligent efforts to answer our queries and for taking pictures of the specimens. The collection of specimens was made possible by generous funding provided by the NOAA Ocean Exploration program (NA03OAR4600116), NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (for ship time on RV Delaware II), NOAA National Undersea Research Program (NA05OAR4301001), and NSF (OCE-0096373). We would like to thank J. Moore's colleagues in the Mountains in the Sea and Deep Atlantic Stepping Stones Research Groups: J. Adkins, P. Auster, S. France, I. Babb, L. Mullineaux, K. Scanlon, T. Shank, M. Vecchione, and L. Watling and for their help in securing the necessary funding and ship time to allow us to explore north-western Atlantic seamounts. Our sincere thanks to the captains and crew of the RV Atlantis and the NOAA ships Delaware II and Ronald H. Brown, who together with the skillful pilots of the DSV Alvin and ROV Hercules, made it possible to collect high quality imagery and specimens from great depths. We thank Cécile Jolly (EBC, Uppsala University) for assistance using the 2200 TapeStation and Raphaël Cárdenas (Gluntens Montessoriskola, Uppsala) for help measuring the specimens. This work has received funding from an Inez Johansson grant (HT2014, Uppsala University, Sweden) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program through the SponGES project (grant agreement no. 679849). © The Author(s) 2017 - Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Identifiers

ISSN
1867-1624

Funding

SponGES – Deep-sea Sponge Grounds Ecosystems of the North Atlantic: an integrated approach towards their preservation and sustainable exploitation 679849
European Commission