Animals much evolve fascinating powers to defend themselves from pathogens, contamination, or predators. Take the case of sea cucumbers : they scare off their predators by literally spilling their guts, which regenerate within a few weeks. Although scientists have known about this evasive stunt for a long time, the genetic elements that enable such a feat remained a mystery. nowadays, a recent sketch published in PLoS Biology reports the sea cucumber genome sequence and pinpoints the genes involved in gut regeneration .
“ This is a very dainty example of what can be done with genic analyses, ” said Leroy Hood from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, who was not involved with the study. “ I think this will indeed be a very valuable resource. ”
Sea cucumbers belong to the phylum Echinodermata, but their structure and function differ from other echinoderms. For case, sea cucumbers are gentle and cylindrical, while echinoderms such as ocean stars and sea urchins have calcified exoskeletons and five-sided isotropy. The visceral re-formation defense mechanism mechanism is besides singular to sea cucumbers .
curious about these differences, Annie Mercier from Memorial University in Canada, who led this study, embarked upon sequencing the sea cucumber genome. “ It ’ s been a hanker wind inaugural, ” she said. “ This one is in truth the beginning very complete and high-quality genome with which you can actually gather information in the future. ”
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Mercier and colleagues knew from other studies that tandem gene repeats primarily drive genome development. They suspected that such gene repeats were creditworthy for the singular visceral regeneration abilities of sea cucumbers, so they looked for clusters of tandem-duplicated genes in the sea cucumber genome.
They following evaluated gene expression from these clusters during visceral regeneration. To achieve this, the team chemically induced ocean cucumbers to expel their guts. Over the future 21 days, they sporadically isolated RNA from the regenerating intestine tissues. indisputable adequate, they saw a dramatic 10,000-fold up-regulated construction of genes from one cluster during the early stages of gut regeneration, indicating that they play a function in this work .
The team believes that their findings will propel the sea cucumber to become a model organism for studying regenerative medicine in the future. In addition, they hope that their results will better inform selective breed in sea cucumber aquaculture and enable their sustainable production .
In the future, Mercier plans to sequence genomes from other echinoderms, since they occupy an authoritative position in the evolutionary tree at the branch diverging from chordates, potentially offering more advance evolutionary understand .
