While household sponges are degraded to the dirty job of scrubbing grime off of kitchen counter tops, the recently sequenced genome of a marine sponge could increase the understanding of the origins of animals as well as cancer, according to a new study. A team of scientists – led by Daniel Rokhsar, UC Berkeley professor of molecular cell biology and physics and program head for computational genomics at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute – assembled a draft genome sequence of the Amphimedon queenslandica, a sponge native to the Great Barrier Reef, which researchers said provides insight into how animals evolved to become more complex organisms.
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