ISOLATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF A CDNA-ENCODING A POTENTIAL MORPHOGEN FROM THE MARINE SPONGE GEODIA-CYDONIUM THAT IS CONSERVED IN HIGHER METAZOANS

Species belonging to the lowest metazoan phylum, the sponges (Porifera ), exhibit a surprisingly complex and multifaceted Bauplan (body plan) . Recently, key molecules have been isolated from sponges which demons trate that the cells of these animals are provided with characteristic metazoan adhesion and signal transduction molecules, allowing tissue formation. In order to understand which factors control the spatial or ganization of these cells in the sponge body plan, we screened for a c DNA encoding a soluble modulator of the behaviour of endothelial cells . A cDNA encoding a putative protein, which is highly similar to the h uman and mouse endothelial monocyte-activating polypeptide (EMAP) II h as been isolated from a library of the marine sponge Geodia cydonium. The sponge EMAP-related polypeptide (EMAPR) has been termed EMAPR1_GC. The full-length cDNA clone, GCEMAPR1, has a size of 592 nucleotides ( nt) and contains a 447 nt-long potential open reading frame; the molec ular weight (MW) of the deduced amino acid sequence, 16 499 Da, is clo se to that of mature mammalian EMAP II (ca. 18 kDa). The sponge polype ptide is also closely related to a deduced polypeptide from the cosmid clone F58B3 isolated from Caenorhabditis elegans. A phylogenetic anal ysis revealed that the sponge and the nematode EMAPR molecules form a cluster which is significantly separated from the corresponding mammal ian EMAP molecules. The function of the first cloned putative soluble modulator of endothelial cells in sponges remains to be determined.