"Marine sponges" refers to a type of living creature that can be found in the ocean. They are not plants but are animals that don't have a backbone. They have a soft and porous body with many tiny holes.
Marine sponges are important for the health of ocean ecosystems because they filter water and provide habitats for other small animals.
Full definition
«The sponges strike back: Biologists researched how separated cells
of marine sponges reaggregate back.»
The world's first (and still best) fiber optics, photonic crystals, and LED Bragg refractors were invented
by marine sponges, beetles, and tropical butterflies.
Animals have incredible variation in their body shapes and ways of life, including the plant - like,
immobile marine sponges that lack heads, eyes, limbs and complex organs, parasitic worms that live inside other organisms (e.g. nematodes, platyhelminths), and phyla with eyes, skeletons, limbs and complex organs that dominate the land in terms of species numbers (arthropods) and body size (chordates).
Lacking hands, dolphins are limited in what they can do with a tool, but some bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, have devised a way to
break marine sponges off the seafloor and wear them over their snouts when foraging.
Researchers found that bottlenose dolphins share knowledge of how to
use marine sponges for foraging, reflecting a combination of tool use and social learning.
Daniel E. Morse of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that by putting enzymes that mimic those of
marine sponges onto gold surfaces, his team could create templates for growing semiconductor films.
Marine sponges build intricate skeletons with an internal structure made of glass needles by using enzymes known as silicateins that act both as catalysts that assemble the glass and as physical templates to form the material into needle shapes.
The team chose silicateins — proteins that build the silica skeletons
of marine sponges — as the basis for their work.
A toxin that jams a common cellular motor has been discovered in
a marine sponge.
A prime example is discodermalide, produced naturally by
a marine sponge, but in very small quantities.
A compound, adociasulfate - 2, was isolated from
a marine sponge, Haliclona (also known asAdocia) species, that inhibited kinesin activity by targeting its motor domain and mimicking the activity of the microtubule.
Andrey Lavrov and Igor Kosevich, MSU biologists, researched the ability of the cells of
marine sponges (Porifera) to reaggregation — a process, during which the artificially separated sponge cells reaggregate and build multicellular aggregates of varying types.
Marine sponges are the most ancient group of multicellular animalsliving on Earth.
Reaggregation of
marine sponges» cells helped the scientists to come closer to understanding of the origin and early evolution of multicellular animals.The work was published in Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology.
The main result of our study is a detailed description of the cell reaggregation process dynamics, and also of the structure of multicellular aggregates of
the marine sponges belonging to the Demospongiae class,» explains Andrey Lavrov.
The last few years have somewhat caused a «gold rush» and many substance researchers are trying their luck with the oceans, be it either marine fungi or the industrial growing of
marine sponges to produce substances.