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About 700 million years ago, sponges branched off from all other animals on the tree of life. Despite this evolutionary distance, sponges share a form of gene regulation with much more complex species. The mechanisms are so similar, in fact, that a genetic element called an enhancer from the sea sponge Amphimedon queenslandica can drive transcription in specific cell types in mice and zebrafish, despite the fact that the genomes of these animals don’t normally include a similar sequence, according to a study published late last year in Science.
The result was totally surprising, says Emily Wong, a computational genomics researcher at Victor Chang Cardiac Institute in Australia and a coauthor of the study. “We didn’t think it would work.”
The results serve as an extreme example of what scientists are now recognizing as trends among enhancers—that activity can be conserved over long evolutionary timescales and ...
