show Abstracthide AbstractRNA from the Mediterranean sponges Aplysina aerophoba and Dysidea avara was extracted at 1h, 3h and 5h after being incubated with bacteria consortia enriched from ambient seawater or with symbiont fraction extracted from the tissue of A. aerophoba. Library construction was performed with the TruSeq stranded mRNA library prep kit (Illumina, Inc., USA), including a poly-A enrichment step. Paired-end sequenced (150 bp) was performed on a NovaSeq S2 system (Illumina, Inc., USA) at the IKMB Kiel (Germany).