Shiny worms can unravel the secrets of regeneration

[ad_1]
In 1961, Osamu Shimomura and Frank Johnson isolated a protein from jellyfish glowing green Under UV light. Corals can also have fluorescence of many colors, thanks to similar proteins. Now scientists at Harvard University have genetically altered the three-banded panther worm to emit a green glow similar to the creature, according to one. new paper published in the journal Developmental cell. Their hope is to find secrets for regeneration.
Most animals show some kind of regeneration: re-growth of hair, for example, or reassembly of a broken bone. But some creatures are able to perform particularly amazing regenerative feats, and studying the mechanisms by which they achieve them can have important consequences for human aging. If a salamander loses a leg, the limb will grow backfor example, some geckos may release their tails while distracting predators from escaping and then grow them. Zebrafish can grow a lost or damaged fin, as well as repair a damaged heart, retina, pancreas, brain, or spinal cord. Cut the planar worm, a jellyfish or a sea anemone in half, and it will regenerate the whole body.
And then there’s the three-banded panther worm (Hofstenia miamia), a small creature that looks like a chunky grain of rice because of its trio mark with cream-colored streaks all over its body. If the panther worm is cut into three parts, each worm will form a fully formed worm within eight weeks or so. These worms are mainly found in the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and Bermuda, as well as in Japan, and are honest predators if they are quite hungry to take a few bites on panther worms and find no other prey. . They also offer a promising new model for studying the mechanics of regeneration.
Author Mansi Srivastava, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, has been studying the three-band panther worm since 2010 when he was a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Peter Reddien’s MIT Whitehead Institute. About 120 worms were collected in Bermuda and brought to Cambridge. The worms did not immediately adapt to laboratory life: Srivastava and Reddien had to find the right levels of water salinity and find an acceptable source of food. The worms didn’t care if Reddien fed his worms to his plan, and a few resorted to cannibalism to survive. Eventually, the researchers realized that they loved the panther worms brine shrimp (aka sea monkeys), and eventually the creatures began to grow and reproduce.
A 1960 report said worm-cut heads could grow, but there was little scientific follow-up. Early experiments by Reddien and Srivastava showed that panther worms could not only grow heads, they could recreate almost any part of the body, like flat plane worms, although both have a distant relationship. Srivastava runs his lab at Harvard, studying the regeneration of panther worms.
In 2019, Srivastava and his lab released the entire panther worm genome sequence, as well as the identification of some “DNA breakers” that are said to control genes for the regeneration of the whole body. Specifically, they determined a section of uncoded DNA that controls whether a type of “main control gene” for regeneration is activated, called an early growth response (EGR). EGR, in turn, can activate or deactivate other genes involved in several processes. If EGR is not activated, worm regeneration cannot occur.
[ad_2]
Source link