![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Scientists were able to dissociate sponges, breaking them up into their constituent cells and get a transcript of what each cell was doing, but they couldn’t see precisely how those cells were working together in concert. The sea sponge genome was sequenced years ago, but we didn’t have the tools to make heads or tails of what all those genes were doing. “When it came out that they had these synaptic genes it gave us a window into what the transition from simple organisms to more complex organisms might have looked like.” “For a long time, sponges were assumed to be these weird alien-like creatures with a body plan very different from what we have, with very simple behaviors, and it was assumed they didn’t really have anything in common with us,” Musser told SYFY WIRE. As a result, understanding the way sponge’s bodies are built and the way they operate in the oceans, can give us clues to how more complex animals evolved over time. In fact, some scientists believe the very first animal was a sponge-like creature. Our last common ancestor with sponges is pretty ancient there’s been a lot of time to diverge, and sponges haven’t changed a whole lot in the intervening time. Their results were published in the journal Science. Musser and Detlev Arendt, from the Developmental Biology Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), along with colleagues, are uncovering cell interactions which look a whole lot like the precursor to what we might recognize as a nervous system. \): (a) Clathrina clathrus belongs to class Calcarea, (b) Staurocalyptus spp.No one ever accused SpongeBob SquarePants of being smart, but we might need to give him a little bit more credit. ![]()
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