Bacterial diversity in wild tropical marine sponges of southwestern South China Sea

This dataset consists of raw sequencing data (fasta) and analysed relative abundance data (histograms of the dominant 10 species in respective taxonomic ranks ). This project shows the first bacterial diversity profiling of high-microbial-abundance wild tropical marine sponges of southern South China Sea, which are Aaptos aaptos and Xestospongia muta from Bidong and Redang islands, Malaysia. Marine sponges are acknowledged as a bacterial hotspot and resource of novel natural products or genetic material. However, sponge-associated bacteria are difficult to be cultivated and the production of their desirable metabolites are inadequate in terms of rate and quantity, yet bioinformatics and metagenomics tools are progressing. Therefore, the diversity profiling of bacterial communities in marine sponges reveals the approximate gene pool for the gene mining or isolation of bacteria that are potentially and commercially beneficial in manufacturing industry, medicine, or agriculture. The bacterial community data exploited from this project is useful for critical comparison through additional or integrated bioinformatics processing with other marine sponge-associated bacterial community profile data. The community data of this project also unveils some general physiological function of the sponge-associated bacterial assemblage in its local environment.