Abstract
Sponges (Porifera) are presently gaining increased scientific attention because of their secondary metabolites and specific skeleton structures. In contrast to demosponges, whose skeletons are formed from biopolymer spongin, glass sponges (hexactinellids) possess silica‐organic composites as the main natural material for their skeletal fibres. Chitin has a crystalline structure and it constitutes a network of organized fibres. This structure confers rigidity and resistance to organisms that contain it, including monocellular (yeast, amoeba, diatoms) and multicellular (higher fungi, arthropods, nematodes, molluscs) organisms. In contrast to different marine invertebrates whose exoskeletons are built of chitin, this polysaccharide has not been found previously as an endogenous biopolymer within glass sponges (Hexactinellida). We hypothesized that glass sponges, which are considered to be the most basal lineage of multicellular animals, must possess chitin. Here, we present a detailed study of the structural and physico‐chemical properties of skeletal fragments of the glass sponge Farrea occa. We show that these fibres have a layered design with specific compositional variations in the chitin/silica composite. We applied an effective approach for the demineralization of glass sponge skeletal formations based on an etching procedure using alkali solutions. The results show unambiguously that α‐chitin is an essential component of the skeletal structures of Hexactinellida. This is the first report of a silica–chitin's composite biomaterial found in nature. From this perspective, the view that silica–chitin scaffolds may be key templates for skeleton formation also in ancestral unicellular organisms, rather than silica–protein composites, emerges as a viable alternative hypothesis. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 308B:473–483, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.