Viruses are among the most abundant biological entities in the ocean, largely responsible of modulating nutrients fluxes and influencing microbial composition and functioning. In marine invertebrate holobionts like sponges and their associated microbiomes, little is known about virome composition. Here, we characterized the Haliclona fulva hologenome, an encrusting low-microbial abundance sponge found across the Western Medite...

Summary Despite various efforts to develop tools to detect and compare the catabolic potential and activity for pollutant degradation in environmental samples, there is still a need for an open‐source, curated and reliable array method. We developed a custom array system including a novel normalization strategy that can be applied to any microarray design, allowing the calculation of the reliability of signals and make cross‐e...

Summary Microbial degradation is the main mechanism responsible for the recovery of contaminated sites, where a huge body of investigations is available in which most concentrate on single isolates from soils capable of mineralizing pollutants. The rapid development of molecular techniques in recent years allows immense insights into the processes in situ , including identification of organisms active in target sites, communit...

Summary The extradiol dioxygenase diversity of a site highly contaminated with aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons under air‐sparging treatment was assessed by functional screening of a fosmid library in Escherichia coli with catechol as substrate. The 235 positive clones from inserts of DNA extracted from contaminated soil were equivalent to one extradiol dioxygenase‐encoding gene per 3.6 Mb of DNA screened, indicating a stro...

Summary Resin acids are tricyclic diterpenoids naturally synthesized by trees that are released from wood during pulping processes. Using a newly designed primer set, genes similar to that encoding the DitA1 catalytic α‐subunit of the diterpenoid dioxygenase, a key enzyme in abietane resin acid degradation by Pseudomonas abietaniphila BKME‐9, could be amplified from different Pseudomonas strains, whereas ditA1 gene sequence ty...

Summary Developments in molecular biology based techniques have led to rapid and reliable tools to characterize microbial community structures and to monitor their dynamics under in situ conditions. However, there has been a distinct lack of emphasis on monitoring the functional diversity in the environment. Genes encoding catechol 2,3‐dioxygenases (C23O), as key enzymes of various aerobic aromatic degradation pathways, were u...