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Originally published in Science Express on 31 May 2007
Science 29 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5833, pp. 1893 - 1895
DOI: 10.1126/science.1141560
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Reports

Sponge Paleogenomics Reveals an Ancient Role for Carbonic Anhydrase in Skeletogenesis

Daniel J. Jackson,1,2 Luciana Macis,1 Joachim Reitner,1 Bernard M. Degnan,2 Gert Wörheide1*

Sponges (phylum Porifera) were prolific reef-building organisms during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic ~542 to 65 million years ago. These ancient animals inherited components of the first multicellular skeletogenic toolkit from the last common ancestor of the Metazoa. Using a paleogenomics approach, including gene- and protein-expression techniques and phylogenetic reconstruction, we show that a molecular component of this toolkit was the precursor to the {alpha}-carbonic anhydrases ({alpha}-CAs), a gene family used by extant animals in a variety of fundamental physiological processes. We used the coralline demosponge Astrosclera willeyana, a "living fossil" that has survived from the Mesozoic, to provide insight into the evolution of the ability to biocalcify, and show that the {alpha}-CA family expanded from a single ancestral gene through several independent gene-duplication events in sponges and eumetazoans.

1 Geoscience Centre Göttingen, Department of Geobiology, Goldschmidtstrasse 3, D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.
2 School of Integrative Biology, University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gert.woerheide{at}geo.uni-goettingen.de

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)