Table 1.
List of sponge species collected.
Fig 1.
Alpha diversity indices of microbial communities from the 12 sponge species and seawater (SW).
Community richness was estimated using observed species (S.obs), chao 1 estimator (S.chao1) and abundance-based coverage estimator (S.ACE). Community diversity was calculated using Shannon and Simpson indices. Analyses were executed with phyloseq package v 1.5.15 [47] in the R environment (http://www.R-project.org/) and plotted using ggplot2 [85]. Sample description is provided in Table 1.
Fig 2.
Taxonomic compositions and relative abundance of the OTUs from the sponge species and surrounding seawater.
Different color pellets are assigned to represent bacterial groups. Detailed information about sample codes is provided in Table 1.
Fig 3.
Microbial community differentiations among the intertidal Atlantic Ocean samples.
Non-metric multidimensional scaling plots showing the pattern of microbial communities recovered from the sponge samples and seawater. Each sample code and its designated colored dots were delimited by an ellipse for visualization purpose. Stress value < 0.05 shows an excellent representation in NMDS analysis, while stress value < 0.01 gives a good representation. Analyses were executed with phyloseq package v 1.5.15 [47] in the R environment (http://www.R-project.org/) and plotted using ggplot2 [85].
Fig 4.
UPGMA cluster analysis of Crenarchaeotal communities associated with the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea samples.
The bold letters indicate the samples from the current study. Detailed information about sample codes is provided in Table 1 (this study). Sequence data from the Red Sea samples were obtained from previous study [8].
Fig 5.
Core bacterial communities assigned to the sponge samples.
The x-axis represents the core microbiata assignment defined as the distributions of the OTUs that are present in 50–100% of the sponge samples studied.
Fig 6.
Histogram representation of the co-occurrence analysis.
The observed C-score from the real data set (sponge associated microbes) is represented by an arrow on to the simulated C-scores.