Marine sponges are potential sources of many unique metabolites, including cytotoxic and anticancer compounds. Natural sponge populations are insufficient or inaccessible for producing commercial quantities of metabolites of interest. This review focuses on methods of producing sponge biomass to overcome supply limitations. Production techniques discussed include aquaculture in the sea, the con...

Bone tissue engineering may provide an alternative to autograft, however scaffold optimisation is required to maximize bone ingrowth. In designing scaffolds, pore architecture is important and there is evidence that cells prefer a degree of non-uniformity. The aim of this study was to compare scaffolds derived from a natural porous marine sponge (Spongia agaricina) with unique architecture to t...

We study subgroups of Z which possess group theoretic properties analogous to properties introduced by Menger (1924), Hurewicz (1925), Rothberger (1938), and Scheepers (1996). We obtain purely combinatorial characterizations of these properties, and combine them with other techniques to solve several questions of Babinkostova, Kočinac, and Scheepers. We also show that, while the Menger Conjectu...

In this paper propositions will be established concerning the collection of all the cut points of a given planef continuum. It will be shown that there does not exist an uncountable collection of mutually exclusive subcontinua of a given continuum M each of which contains at least one cut point of M. With the aid of this fundamental theorem it is shown, among other things, that the set of all t...

We establish a surprising connection between Menger’s classical covering property and Blass’s modern combinatorial notion of groupwise density. This connection implies a short proof of the groupwise density bound on the additivity number for Menger’s property.

Sponges (Phylum Porifera) are an evolutionary and ecologically significant group; however information on processes influencing sponge population distributions is surprisingly limited. Carteriospongia foliascens is a common Indo-Pacific sponge, which has been reported from the intertidal to the mesophotic. Interestingly, the distribution of C. foliascens at inshore reefs of the Great Barrier Ree...

This paper proposes a novel construction, calledduplex, closely related to the sponge construction, that acceptsmessage blocks to be hashed and—at no extra cost—provides digests on the input blocks received so far. It can be proven equivalent to a cascade of sponge functions and hence inherits its security against single-stage generic a acks. The main application proposed here is an authenticat...

Sponge diseases have been widely reported, yet the causal factors and major pathogenic microbes remain elusive. In this study, two individuals of the sponge Crella cyathophora in total that showed similar disease-like characteristics were collected from two different locations along the Red Sea coast separated by more than 30 kilometers. The disease-like parts of the two individuals were both c...

This study investigated the removal of micropollutants using polyurethane sponge as attached-growth carrier. Batch experiments demonstrated that micropollutants could adsorb to non-acclimatized sponge cubes to varying extents. Acclimatized sponge showed significantly enhanced removal of some less hydrophobic compounds (log D<2.5), such as ibuprofen, acetaminophen, naproxen, and estriol, as comp...