Ryu, TaewooSeridi, LoqmaneMoitinho-Silva, LucasOates, MatthewLiew, Yi JMavromatis, CharalamposWang, XiaoleiHaywood, AnnikaLafi, Feras FKupresanin, MarijaSougrat, RachidAlzahrani, Majed AGiles, EmilyGhosheh, YanalSchunter, CeliaBaumgarten, SebastianBerumen, Michael LGao, XinAranda, ManuelForet, SylvainGough, JulianVoolstra, Christian RHentschel, UteRavasi, Timothy2016-02-292016-02-291471-2164http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12864-016-2501-0http://hdl.handle.net/1885/99867BACKGROUND: Sponges (Porifera) harbor distinct microbial consortia within their mesohyl interior. We herein analysed the hologenomes of Stylissa carteri and Xestospongia testudinaria, which notably differ in their microbiome content. RESULTS: Our analysis revealed that S. carteri has an expanded repertoire of immunological domains, specifically Scavenger Receptor Cysteine-Rich (SRCR)-like domains, compared to X. testudinaria. On the microbial side, metatranscriptome analyses revealed an overrepresentation of potential symbiosis-related domains in X. testudinaria. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide genomic insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying host-symbiont coevolution and may serve as a roadmap for future hologenome analyses.This work was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. LMS was supported by a grant of the German Excellence Initiative to the Graduate School of Life Sciences, University of Wuerzburg.© 2016 Ryu et al. 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. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.enRyu et al.2016-02-2910.1186/s12864-016-2501-02016-02-29