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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Cultural Heritage: Porifera (Sponges), A Taxon Successfully Progressing Paleontology, Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Biomedicine

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In 1876, Campbell (Campbell, 1876 [p. 446]) wrote “those beautiful ‘glass-rope sponges’, Hyalonema etc., have been found by our researchers to be ‘the most characteristic inhabitants of the great depths all over the world, and with them ordinary siliceous sponges, some of which rival Hyalospongiae in beauty’ “. The admiration for the beauty of sponges is documented since Aristotle (cited in Camus 1783), however the nature of these organisms and their phylogenetic position remained enigmatic until less than 10 years ago. E.g., in 1988 Loomis (Loomis, 1988 [p. 186]) wrote “the sponge cells are unspecialized flagellates held together by a glycoprotein extracellular matrix... they are multicellular, but just barely so”. This view changed drastically since the introduction of modern molecular biological techniques; the informational genes investigated in detail now group the sponges to the Metazoa leaving any doubt on their evolutionary origin behind. The first breakthrough came with the study of the galectin molecule from Geodia cydonium, when it was discovered that the deduced polypeptide shared high sequence similarity only with metazoan proteins and comprised all characteristic amino acid moieties required for the binding to the sugar (Pfeifer et al., 1993).