Cultivation of marine sponges for metabolite production: applications for biotechnology?

The world's oceans harbour a large diversity of living organisms. As tropical rainforests have been searched for natural drugs, these marine organisms are being screened for useful products, and a number have been found in marine sponges. These are often produced only in trace amounts, and so a large quantity of sponges must be collected to obtain sufficient amounts of the target compounds. Hence, sustainable production of these compounds requires alternatives to harvesting sponge biomass directly from the sea, including the biotechnological production of sponge metabolites.