Collegian Staff
Although they may seem like simple underwater creatures, sponges could hold answers to many questions about evolution that University of Richmond biology professors Malcolm and April Hill are researching with a recently awarded grant from the National Science Foundation.
"Assembling the Tree of Life: The Porifera Tree of Life Project" will be an investigation into the evolutionary relationships among sponges. Malcolm Hill said this meant finding out how the many existing species of sponges related to one another, which will also help them learn more about evolution in general.
He said sponges were one of the first animals living on Earth, and they shared some characteristics, such as multi-cellularity, with animals living today and their common ancestors.
The researchers will use a technique that involves the construction of a phylogeny, or a tree of life, he said.
"All the sponges that live out there today are like the leaves," he said, "and they're all connected to each other based on some branch that's connected back to the animal tree, and by understanding that sponge branch we can actually learn a lot about the rest of the animals that are out there and some of the important events that happened in evolutionary history."
Only part of the five-year grant was awarded to researchers at Richmond. The Hills are collaborating with a group of schools composed of Iowa State University, Nova Southeastern University, Dartmouth College and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, along with the Smithsonian Institution. There will also be international involvement; Malcolm Hill said it had been during a meeting in Brazil that he had first thought of the idea for the research project.
The job of the research team at Richmond, which will include undergraduate students, will be "sequencing seven to 10 genes from about 75 families of sponge," and using them to build the phylogenies, which they will be doing with a professor from Nova Southeastern University in Florida.
Malcolm Hill compared this process to detective work with the genes serving as clues, telling researches where the species of sponges will be placed on the phylogeny. It involves converting the sponges' RNA into DNA, which he said set this project apart. To convert the RNA to DNA, a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction would be used, which he said would actually be done at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., not in Richmond. They will then use computer software to tease apart the evolutionary relationships, he said.
The undergraduate students who will be working on the research with the Hills have yet to be selected, he said.
Malcolm Hill also mentioned the possibility of doing field work by traveling to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama to collect sponge samples. April Hill said she worked mostly in the lab, but if she got the opportunity to do field work and actually get in the water, she would go.
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Although the evolutionary relationship research will not begin until next semester, there are other types of research on sponges being done right now at Richmond. Senior Ashley McQuillin is part of a group researching a sponge symbiotic which is also found on corals. She said she and her group wanted to determine if these sponges were related to the corals, and that the group was working on publishing its research.
Another project studies the purpose of carotenoids in certain sponges, senior Giles Thomson said, which are what give carrots, and the sponges they're found in, their orange color. He also said the research group was trying to find the origin of the carotenoids in the sponges.
"How did multi-cellularity evolve? ... When did nerves evolve? ... When did muscle cells evolve?" are some of the questions Malcolm said the researchers hoped to answer.
"One of the things we'll probably find is that sponges are a really diverse and complex group," Malcolm Hill said, "and what's probably true is that the common ancestor was very much like a sponge. We were all sponges in our evolutionary paths ...
"I think we're going to support that idea."
Contact staff writer Elizabeth Hyman at elizabeth.hyman@richmond.edu
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