CO I Barcoding Reveals New Clades and Radiation Patterns of Indo-Pacific Sponges oof the Family Irciniidae

Background: DNA barcoding is a promising tool to facilitate a rapid and unambiguous identification of sponge species. Demosponges of the order Dictyoceratida are particularly challenging to identify, but are of ecological as well as biochemical importance. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we apply DNA barcoding with the standard CO1-barcoding marker on selected Indo-Pacific specimens of two genera, Ircinia and Psammocinia of the family Irciniidae. We show that the CO1 marker identifies several species new to science, reveals separate radiation patterns of deep-sea Ircinia sponges and indicates dispersal patterns of Psammocinia species. However, some species cannot be unambiguously barcoded by solely this marker due to low evolutionary rates. Conclusions/Significance: We support previous suggestions for a combination of the standard CO1 fragment with an additional fragment for sponge DNA barcoding. Citation: Pöppe J, Sutcliffe P, Hooper JNA, Wörheide G, Erpenbeck D (2010) CO I Barcoding Reveals New Clades and Radiation Patterns of Indo-Pacific Sponges of the Family Irciniidae (Demospongiae: Dictyoceratida). PLoS ONE 5(4): e9950. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009950 Editor: John J. Welch, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Received July 8, 2009; Accepted September 28, 2009; Published April 1, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Pöppe et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study benefited from funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG, www.dfg.de) to GW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected]