Molecular Geobiology & Palaeobiology Lab

15/12/2023

New review just out, about the biology and ecology of five corallivorous Acanthaster species. Another great collaboration with colleagues around the globe!

Coral-eating crown-of-thorns seastars (CoTS, Acanthaster spp.) are major contributors to the coral reef crises across the Indo-Pacific region. Until recently, CoTS throughout the Indo-Pacific were regarded to be a single species, Acanthaster planci. However, genetic and morphological analyses demons...

27/11/2023

Glad to announce our newest paper. We used target capture to enrich hundreds of loci in and produce robust phylogenies for this difficult group. Congratulations to everyone involved, great collaboration!
Very happy to see this milestone paper for sponge systematics and phylogenetics finally out 😀, as part of Taxon-Omics DFG SPP 1991, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, also an outcome of Ignite: Comparative genomics of non-model invertebrates, made at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

van der Sprong, J., de Voogd, N. J., McCormack, G. P., Sandoval, K., Schätzle, S., Voigt, O., Erpenbeck, D., Wörheide, G., & Vargas, S. (2023). A novel target-enriched multilocus assay for sponges (Porifera): Red Sea Haplosclerida (Demospongiae) as a test case. Molecular Ecology Resources, Early View

29/06/2023

The last one for June: fantastic work led by Sergio on sponge-microbiome interaction in our pet aquariaum sponge published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution! Another great transdisciplinary collaboration with many colleagues from Germany and Australia.

conducted at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Researchers at LMU demonstrate that sponges react to changes in their microbiome with extensive modifications in gene regulation.

21/06/2023

https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/glass-sponge-genome-furnishes-insights-into-evolution-of-biomineralization.html

June continues to be productive: long time in the making, but finally out (Open Access):
The genome of the reef-building glass sponge Aphrocallistes vastus.
Another great collaboration with many colleagues around the world.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230423

Research conducted at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, funded by ITN IGNITE Ignite: Comparative genomics of non-model invertebrates



Pic (c) Sally Leys and CSSF ROPOS

18/06/2023

June has been great so far:
another superb contribution to the knowledge of (this time fossil) sponges from the PhD thesis of Luis Porras: a new sponge genus from the Cambrian Changjiang biota with an intriguing combination of skeletal characters.
Great collaboration with our colleagues in China!

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The development of fossil sponge systematics is hindered by factors such as their low anatomical complexity and the low preservation potential of many characters used in the definition of extant sponge clades. Here we describe Calliospongia chunchengia gen. et sp. nov., a new sponge from the Lower C...

18/06/2023

Fantastic new paper by Adrian Galitz et al., another chapter of his PhD thesis on the molecular biodiversity of Pacific demosponges. Another great collaboration with our colleagues in France, Ireland, and Australia! (open access)

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

The distribution of marine sponges in the tropical Southwest Pacific Ocean is largely unexplored despite the vital ecological role of sponges in coral reefs and their value as sources of metabolites for drug design. Several collection campaigns to the French Polynesian archipelagos (Society, Marques...

27/04/2023

Exciting new insights into the biodiversity, chemodiversity, and phylogeny of New Zealand glass sponges (Porifera: Hexactinellida) https://peerj.com/articles/15017

This is another outcome of the RV SONNE cruise SO254, where we explored the deep sea sponge fauna around New Zealand using GEOMAR's ROV KIEL6000.

A great collaboration with our colleagues from Oldenburg (DE) and NIWA (NZ), and the late and great Henry Reiswig!

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Glass sponges (Hexactinellida) constitute important parts of ecosystems on the deep-sea floor worldwide. However, they are still an understudied group in terms of their diversity and systematics. Here, we report on new specimens collected during RV Sonne expedition SO254 to the New Zealand region, w...

24/03/2023

Seven reviews later it is finally out - what a journey!!!
Thanks to all reviewers, their constructive criticisms greatly improved our work and its presentation.

Here, we again work on difficult nodes in the animal tree of life.
An accurate phylogeny of animals is needed to clarify their evolution, ecology, and impact on shaping the biosphere. Although datasets of several hundred thousand amino acids are nowadays routinely used to test phylogenetic hypotheses, key deep nodes in the metazoan tree remain unresolved: the root of animals, the root of Bilateria, and the monophyly of Deuterostomia. Instead of using the standard approach of amino acid datasets, we performed analyses of newly assembled genome gene content and morphological datasets to investigate these recalcitrant nodes in the phylogeny of animals. We explored extensively the choices for assembling the genome gene content dataset and model choices of morphological analyses. Our results are robust to these choices and provide additional insights into the early evolution of animals, they are consistent with sponges as the sister group of all the other animals, the worm-like bilaterian lineage Xenacoelomorpha as the sister group of the other Bilateria, and tentatively support monophyletic Deuterostomia.

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Ignite: Comparative genomics of non-model invertebrates

An accurate phylogeny of animals is needed to clarify their evolution, ecology, and impact on shaping the biosphere. Although datasets of several hundred thousand amino acids are nowadays routinely used to test phylogenetic hypotheses, key deep nodes in the metazoan tree remain unresolved: the root....

17/11/2022

Please welcome a new species of crown-of-thorns seastars from the Red Sea to the world, Acanthaster benziei.

LMU researchers have identified coral-eating crown-of-thorns seastars in the Red Sea as distinct species that occurs only in this location.

17/10/2022

What a fantastic event the 11th World Sponge Conference in Leiden (NL) last week was - finally reconnected with the community and the lab's research was very well presented in several talks and posters by Joëlle, Adrian, Olli and Dirk, and Gert participated as panelist in the Sponge Genomics workshop. Very well done team Munich, awesome performance!

19/09/2022

Joëlle gave a great talk, updating the audience on her PhD project on haplosclerid Taxon-OMICS in Bochum. Well done!

30/08/2022

Biotopia Lab Mystery Object - take the quiz and find out what the mysterious object is!
(Available in English and German)