Scientists at the University of Queensland (UQ) have found that humans, and most likely other animals, share important genetic links to a prehistoric Great Barrier Reef sea sponge.
Bernie Degnan, of the UQ School of Biological Sciences, said some elements of the human genome — an organism’s complete set of DNA — functioned in the same way as the sponge.
“Incredibly, these elements have been preserved across 700 million years of evolution,” Professor Degnan said.
“This mechanism drives gene expression, which is a key to species diversity across the animal kingdom.”
He said it was an important piece of a puzzle over many millions of years, and would feed into future research studies across the medical, technology and life sciences fields.
Former UQ researcher, Emily Wong, now with the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and University of NSW Sydney, said the finding was a fundamental discovery in evolution and the understanding of genetic diseases, which was never imagined to be possible.
“It was such a far-fetched idea to begin with, but we had nothing to lose so we went for it,” Dr Wong said.
“We collected sea sponge samples from the Great Barrier Reef at UQ’s Heron Island Research Station, before extracting DNA samples from the sea sponge and injecting them into a single cell from a zebrafish embryo.”
She said that without harming the zebrafish, researchers repeated the process at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute with hundreds of embryos, inserting small DNA samples from humans and mice as well.
“Despite a lack of similarity between sponge and human DNA, we identified a similar set of genomic instructions that controls gene expression in both organisms — we were blown away by the results,” Dr Wong said.
“The more we know about how our genes are wired, the better we are able to develop new treatments for diseases.”
The research was funded by the Australian Research Council.
