In rivers and streams across the globe lives a tube-shaped carnivore. It paralyzes and captures prey with a crown of tentacles, then draws it in through its mouth (which also serves as its anus). This unsettling creature is a hydra, a freshwater-dwelling cnidarian no more than a half-inch long that eats mostly insect larvae and crustaceans. A hydra’s appearance and eating habits alone give it a sci-fi feel, but its ability to regenerate its body — even its head — from only a scrap of tissue or pile of cells raises it to another level.
“It’s one of these organisms that’s thought to never die unless you try to kill it or, you know, starve it to death,” Ali Mortazavi, a developmental biologist at the University of California, Irvine, said. A hydra’s regenerative abilities allow it to constantly replace bits of itself, so it doesn’t succumb to things like old age or disease. Aside from the immortality perk, constant regeneration means a hydra doesn’t have to sweat the small stuff, like losing body parts. Give it a few days and it will grow back anything.
Dr. Mortazavi and his colleagues have taken a big step in understanding how a hydra regenerates its head. Their research was published in Genome Biology and Evolution on Wednesday.
To investigate what makes this remarkable feat possible, the researchers looked at changes in gene expression — whether a gene is copied from DNA into RNA — throughout the course of hydra head regeneration. This control of gene expression is called epigenetic regulation. Hydras have a genome quite similar to that of species with little regenerative capacity, like humans, so it’s thought that epigenetic regulation plays a major role in making the hydra’s powers of regeneration possible…READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… – OY Vip Press
