# First Report on Presence of Mitochondrial Introns in Freshwater Sponges, and Pseudogenic Evidence of Their Loss

## TL;DR

This paper reports the first mitochondrial intron in freshwater sponges and shows evidence of its loss and transfer to the nuclear genome in a related species.

## Contribution

The study provides the first evidence of pseudogenic intron transposition into the nuclear genome in sponges and explains the patchy intron distribution as due to frequent losses.

## Key findings

- A group-II-intron was found in the freshwater sponge Eunapius rarus, the first such report in freshwater sponges.
- Pseudogenic copies of the intron were found in the nuclear genome of the related species E. fragilis.
- Phylogenetic analysis suggests the intron was inherited from a common ancestor and later lost in E. fragilis.

## Abstract

Mitochondrial introns have a patchy distribution in sponge lineages. Here, we report on the finding of a group-II-intron in Eunapius rarus (Demospongiae, Spongillidae), which constitutes the first report of a mitochondrial intron in freshwater sponges. Group-II-introns are self-splicing ribozymes, and are particularly rare among sponge mitochondrial genomes. The intron contains complete open reading frames (ORFs), including typical intron-encoded proteins (IEPs). Phylogenetic analysis reveals that the intron is more closely related to those found in brown algae, and distant from other sponge group-II-introns, indicating an acquisition of this intron independent from other sponges. Remarkably, the congeneric E. fragilis does not possess this intron in their mitochondrial genome. However, we found pseudogenic copies of the E. rarus group-II-intron in the nuclear genome of E. fragilis, which indicates patterns of group-II-intron presence and their pseudogene transposition into the nuclear genomes in sponges for the first time. Our results show that a group-II-intron must have been present in the last common ancestor of both Eunapius mt genomes, and subsequently lost in E. fragilis, rather than independent acquisition. Consequently, our findings provide an explanation for the patchy distribution of introns in sponges as a result of frequent losses, besides multiple acquisitions.