Aulospongus
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Axinellida
- Family: Raspailiidae
- Genus: Aulospongus
Overview
Aulospongus is a genus of marine sponges (phylum Porifera) placed in the order Axinellida and family Raspailiidae.[2]
Visual Description
Specimen imagery associated with Aulospongus records commonly shows demosponges with encrusting to massive growth forms. In preserved specimens, individuals may present as thick, irregular lobes/plates with rough or spiny external textures depending on species and preservation state.
Bioactive components (selected example)
A dissertation report (for an Aulospongus sponge attributed to Raspailiidae) describes a novel bioactive lectin (“RaspL”). The lectin is reported as a hetero-oligomeric protein complex with variable apparent molecular masses across analytical conditions, including an oligomeric species observed at >100 kDa in native SDS-PAGE and dissociation into ~14 kDa protomers under denaturing conditions.[3]
The same work reports strong hemagglutination activity and pronounced specificity for N-acetylated sugars, with the highest affinity for N-acetyl-D-galactosamine (GalNAc), and additional binding to N-acetylneuraminic acid (NANA) and N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (GlcNAc).[3]
It is also described as exceptionally stable across a broad temperature range (40–100 °C) and pH range (3.0–12.0).[3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Axinellida / Raspailiidae / Aulospongus constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Aulospongus Norman, 1878. GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/2240656. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- 1 2 3 Sobia Nasir. Aulospongus属海綿に由来する新規生物活性レクチンの発見とその構造・機能の包括的解析. Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB). 2026. https://doi.org/10.14943/doctoral.k16715.