[N]one of the projects investigating those potential benefits would be possible without the entire sea sponge genome sequence, which Professor Degnan’s lab successfully mapped and will be publishing this year.
“We and our colleagues at the Joint Genome Institute (US Department of Energy) are the ones who drove this project which really puts us in the driving seat,” he said.
“It is the very first genome project from a Great Barrier Reef animal, for that matter the first from an Australian marine organism.
More information about the sea sponge project can be found on the DOE JGI’s website. The rest of the the University of Queensland’s release is available here.