报告题目: Bacteria-sponge symbiosis - a complex love story

报 告 人：Dr. Torsten Thomas

Associate Professor

School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences & Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation

The University of  New South Wales

报告时间：9月24号（星期三） 13：00-15:00

报告地点：闵行校区生物药学楼2-116

联 系 人：李志勇 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 131-6216-1958

报告摘要：

Marine sponges form intimate relationships with complex communities of bacterial symbionts. This symbiosis is essential for the survival, function and ecology of the sponge host, yet the underlying factors that determine specificity and stability of sponge-bacteria interactions are not well understood. Here I will present two new developments in the field. Firstly, I will introduce the global effort of the Sponge Earth Microbiome Project that aims to describe the bacterial diversity for thousands of sponge samples using high-throughput DNA sequencing. This project will address fundamental questions of host specificity and how environmental factors or biogeography shape the bacterial diversity in sponges. Secondly, I will present the discovery and description of new molecular factors, so called eukaryotic-like proteins (ELPs), that appear to mediate symbiotic interactions between bacteria and sponges. These ELPs are produced by symbiotic bacteria in sponges and have the ability to manipulate cellular behaviour of eukaryotic cells. As these ELPs are also found in other bacterial symbionts they might represent a general way for bacteria to mediate interactions with host cells.