Potential of MALDI−TOF MS-based proteomic fingerprinting for species identification of Cnidaria across classes, species, regions and developmental stages

Morphological identification of cnidarian species can be difficult throughout all life stages due to the lack of distinct morphological characters. Moreover, in some cnidarian taxa genetic markers are not fully informative, and in these cases combinations of different markers or additional morphological verifications may be required. Proteomic fingerprinting based on MALDI-TOF mass spectra was previously shown to provide reliable species identification in different metazoans including some cnidarian taxa. For the first time, we tested the method across four cnidarian classes (Staurozoa, Scyphozoa, Anthozoa, Hydrozoa) and included different scyphozoan life-history stages (polyp, ephyra, medusa) into our dataset. Our results revealed reliable species identification based on MALDI-TOF mass spectra across all taxa with species-specific clusters for all 23 analyzed species. In addition, proteomic fingerprinting was successful for distinguishing developmental stages, still by retaining a species specific signal. Furthermore, we identified the impact of different salinities in different regions (North Sea and Baltic Sea) on proteomic fingerprints to be negligible. In conclusion, the effects of environmental factors and developmental stages on proteomic fingerprints seem to be low in cnidarians. This would allow using reference libraries built up entirely of adult or cultured cnidarian specimens for the identification of their juvenile stages or specimens from different geographic regions in future biodiversity assessment studies.