Bacteria From Sponges Make New Pharmaceuticals
Date: 10.9.2007
Over half of the bodyweight of living **sea sponges** -- including the sort that we use in our baths -- is made up of the many different bacteria that live inside them, in the same way that we all have **bacteria** living in our guts which help us to digest our food.
"Marine sponges are the most prolific and important source of new active compounds discovered in the last twenty or thirty years in our seas. We thought it likely that many of the interesting new compounds we were discovering inside sea sponges were actually being made by the bacteria inside their bodies, not the sponges themselves", says Dr Detmer Sipkema of University College Berkeley, in California, USA.
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For more information "ScienceDaily":[ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070903204947.htm]
