Ecological Filtering is a Better Predictor of Microbiome Assembly than Coevolution in Marine Sponges

This dataset complements the study "Ecological Filtering is a Better Predictor of Microbiome Assembly than Coevolution in Marine Sponges." We investigated whether phylosymbiosis in marine sponges (order Haplosclerida) from the Red Sea is the result of host–microbiome co-diversification or ecological filtering. Using a host phylogeny based on 1,153 target-captured genomic loci (144 specimens), as well as prokaryotic microbiome profiles obtained via V4 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, we demonstrate that host clade identity accounts for approximately 50% of microbiome variation. However, phylogenetic distance shows only a weak correlation with microbiome dissimilarity. The high versus low microbial abundance (HMA–LMA) phenotype was a stronger predictor of microbiome composition than host phylogeny. Convergent HMA clades hosted similar microbiome profiles despite having distant phylogenetic relationships. The results show that it is ecological filtering, and not co-diversification, that is the main driver of sponge–microbiome assembly. This repository contains the raw and processed data, scripts and supplementary materials used in the analyses.