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thepastisalreadywritten · 3 months

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By Dina Fine Maron

January 24, 2024

Scientists have cleared a significant hurdle in the years-long effort to save Africa’s northern white rhinoceros from extinction with the first-ever rhino pregnancy using in vitro fertilization.

The lab-assisted pregnancy, which researchers will announce today, involved implanting a southern white rhino embryo in a surrogate mother named Curra.

The advance provides the essential “proof of concept” that this strategy could help other rhinos, says Jan Stejskal of the BioRescue project, the international group of scientists leading this research.

Curra died just a couple months into her 16-month pregnancy from an unrelated bacterial infection, Stejskal says.

However, the successful embryo transfer and early stages of pregnancy pave the way for next applying the technique to the critically endangered northern white rhino.

The process was documented exclusively by National Geographic for an upcoming Explorer special currently slated to air in 2025 on Nat Geo and Disney+.

BioRescue expects to soon implant a northern white rhino embryo into a southern white rhino surrogate mother.

The two subspecies are similar enough, according to the researchers, that the embryo will be likely to develop.

Eventually, this approach may also help other critically endangered rhinos, including the Asian Javan rhinoceros and the Sumatran rhinoceros, which each now number under 100 individuals, Stejskal says.

But the northern white rhino’s current situation is the most pressing by far.

There are no males left, and the only two remaining animals are both elderly females that live under armed guard on a reserve in a 700-acre enclosure in Kenya called Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

The boxy-jawed animals once roamed across central Africa, but in recent decades, their numbers have plummeted due to the overwhelming international demand for their horn, a substance used for unproved medicinal applications and carvings.

Made from the same substance as fingernails, rhino horn is in demand from all species, yet the northern white rhino has been particularly hard-hit.

"These rhinos look prehistoric, and they had survived for millions of years, but they couldn’t survive us,” says Ami Vitale, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer who has been documenting scientists’ efforts to help the animals since 2009.

“If there is some hope of recovery within the northern white rhino gene pool — even though it’s a substantially smaller sample of what there was — we haven’t lost them,” says conservation ecologist David Balfour, who chairs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s African rhino specialist group.

Blueprints for rhino babies

To stave off the animal’s disappearance, BioRescue has used preserved sperm from northern white rhinos and eggs removed from the younger of the two remaining females.

So far, they’ve created about 30 preserved embryos, says Thomas Hildebrandt, the head scientist of BioRescue and an expert in wildlife reproduction based at the Leibniz-Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.

Eventually, the team plans to reintroduce northern white rhinos into the wild within their range countries.

“That’d be fantastic, but really, really far from now—decades from now,” says Stejskal.

Worldwide, there are five species of rhinoceros, and many are in trouble.

Across all of Africa, there are now only about 23,000 of the animals, and almost 17,000 of them are southern whites.

Then there are more than 6,000 black rhinos, which are slightly smaller animals whose three subspecies are critically endangered.

In Asia, beyond the critically endangered Javan and Sumatran rhinos, there’s also the greater one-horned rhino, whose numbers are increasing and currently are estimated to be around 2,000.

The BioRescue effort has experienced many setbacks, and even though the team now has frozen embryos, the clock is ticking.

The researchers intend to use southern white rhinos as surrogate moms for the northern white rhino embryos.

However, scientists want any northern white rhino calves to meet and learn from others of their kind, which means they need to be born before the two remaining females die.

“These animals learn behaviors — they don’t have them genetically hard-wired,” says Balfour, who’s not involved with the BioRescue work.

But birthing new animals in time will be a challenge.

“We’re really skating on the edge of what’s possible,” he says, “but it’s worth trying.”

Najin, the older female, will be 35 this year, and Fatu will be 24.

The animals, which were born in a zoo in the Czech Republic, are expected to live to about 40, says Stejskal, who also serves as director of international projects at the Safari Park Dvůr Králové, the zoo where the animals lived until they were brought to Kenya in 2009.

Impregnating a rhino

The next phase of BioRescue’s plan involves implanting one of their limited number of northern white rhino embryos into a southern white rhino surrogate mother — which the group plans to do within the next six months, Stejskal says.

They’ve identified the next surrogate mother and set up precautions to protect her from bacterial infections, including a new enclosure and protocols about disinfecting workers’ boots.

But now, they must wait until the female rhino is in estrus — the period when the animal is ready to mate — to implant the egg.

To identify that prime fertile time, they can’t readily perform regular ultrasounds at the conservancy as they might do in a zoo.

Instead, they have enlisted a rhino bull that has been sterilized to act as a “teaser” for the female, Hildebrandt says, adding that they must wait a few months to make sure that their recently sterilized male is truly free of residual sperm.

Once the animals are brought together, their couplings will alert conservancy staff that the timing is right for reproductive success.

The sex act is also important because it sets off an essential chain of events in the female’s body that boosts the chances of success when they surgically implant the embryo about a week later.

"There’s little chance the conservancy staff will miss the act. White rhinos typically mate for 90 minutes," Hildebrandt says.

What’s more, while mounted on the females, the males often use their temporary height to reach tasty plant snacks that are generally out of reach.

Boosting genetic diversity

With so few northern white rhinos left, their genetic viability may seem uncertain.

But the BioRescue team points to southern white rhinos, whose numbers likely dropped to less than 100, and perhaps even as few as 20, due to hunting in the late 1800s.

Government protections and intense conservation strategies allowed them to bounce back, and now there are almost 17,000.

“They have sufficient diversity to cope with a wide range of conditions,” says Balfour.

Researchers don’t know exactly how many southern white rhinos existed a century ago, he says, but it’s clear that the animals came back from an incredibly low population count and that they now appear healthy.

Beyond their small collection of embryos, the BioRescue team hopes to expand the northern white rhino’s gene pool by drawing from an unconventional source — skin cells extracted from preserved tissue samples that are currently stored at zoos.

They aim to use stem cell techniques to reengineer those cells and develop them into sex cells, building off similar work in lab mice.

According to their plan, those lab-engineered sex cells would then be combined with natural sperm and eggs to make embryos, and from there, the embryos would be implanted into southern white rhino surrogate mothers.

Such stem cell reprogramming work has previously led to healthy offspring in lab mice, Hildebrandt says, but rhinos aren’t as well-studied and understood as mice, making this work significantly challenging.

A global effort

The northern white rhino revitalization venture has cost millions of dollars, supported by a range of public and private donors, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Other partners on the effort include the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, the Czech Republic’s Safari Park, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and also Katsuhiko Hayashi, a professor of genome biology at Osaka University in Japan who conducted the mouse stem cell research.

Building upon Hayashi’s stem cell techniques could ultimately bring the northern white rhino gene pool up to 12 animals — including eggs from eight females and the semen of four bulls, according to Stejskal.

An alternative approach to making more babies, like crossbreeding northern and southern white rhinos, would mean the resulting calves wouldn’t be genetically pure northern white rhinos, Hildebrandt notes.

The two subspecies look quite similar, but the northern version has subtle physical differences, including hairier ears and feet that are better suited to its swampy habitat.

The two animals also have different genes that may provide disease resiliency or other benefits, Hildebrandt says.

There are unknown potential differences in behavior and ecological impact when populating the area with southern white rhinos or cross-bred animals.

"The northern white rhino is on the brink of extinction really only due to human greed,” Stejskal says.

“We are in a situation where saving them is at our fingertips, so I think we have a responsibility to try.”

🩶🦏🩶

#northern white rhinoceros #rhino embryo transfer #in vitro fertilization #IVF #southern white rhinoceros #critically endangered animals #National Geographic #BioRescue #rhino horn #International Union for the Conservation of Nature #African rhino specialist group #Thomas Hildebrandt #German Federal Ministry of Education and Research #Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research #Kenya Wildlife Service #Ol Pejeta Conservancy #Katsuhiko Hayashi #genome biology #IVF rhino pregnancy

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iamthekaijuking · 6 months

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This just in, starfish are a radially symmetrical head with a stomach.

God I love echinoderms

If you told someone that there’s an entire group of animals that develop butt first as embryos are born bilateral but then grow a radially symmetrical head like a cancer in their side that then bursts out and lives as a completely separate organism from its birth form and moves via hydraulic systems…

They wouldn’t believe you. Yet one of the most beloved cartoon characters is one of them.

#biology #genomics #genome #genomes #genome sequencing #evolutionary biology #echinoderm #starfish #asteroidea #bilateria #Deuterostome #Deuterostomia

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ryan-sometimes · 3 months

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Being a biochemistry student is so funny because I’ll be staring off into space and look deep in thought but really I’m just thinking about CRISPR. The Roman Empire of every biochem student

#genome editing my beloved #I’ve been thinking way too much about crispr lately #and also zinc finger nucleases #to quote my chemical biology professor ‘the only real limit of gene editing is ethics’#you’re playing god #you’re engineering a living organism however you want #the power trip of it is absolutely insane

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hellsitegenetics · 3 months

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Awesome blog! Why do you think so many of the matches are genome assembly genes rather than structural protein genes?

#asks #unfortunately i am a biology student and i know nothing of the world #as much as i would love to know the answer to this i dont really know where to start #it MIGHT be because that's more of what's in the database though #and i'm only hitting genome assembly bc thats 90% of whats in there

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mindblowingscience · 2 years

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There's something really peculiar about ferns.

Their DNA is weird and complex. In fact, one species of fern – Ophioglossum reticulatum, or the adder's tongue fern – holds the record for the multicellular organism with the most number of chromosomes. Around 720 pairs of chromosomes can be found in most of its cellular nuclei.

Well, turns out we were right to be suspicious.

After years of painstaking work, scientists have finally sequenced the gargantuan genomes of three different homosporous ferns, revealing that these pernicious plants have not only been hoarding DNA, they've been stealing it from other organisms – and doing so for millions of years.

#Ferns #Plants #Botany #Biology #Genetics #Genomes #stem

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reasonsforhope · 11 months

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This is maybe an odd thing to put on a good news/reasons for hope blog, but I've also had people tell me that they find this info really, genuinely comforting, so I'm putting it up. Also, further understanding could do a ton to advance medicine, esp. re: allergies, autoimmune diseases, and depression. You can read more about this at the link.

"More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic [co-contributors].

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves - our microbiome - is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson's.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be "human" and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

"They are essential to your health," says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, "your body isn't just you."

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.

Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: "You're more microbe than you are human."

Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.

"That's been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you're about 43% human if you're counting up all the cells," he says.

But genetically we're even more outgunned.

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: "We don't have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.

"What makes us human is, in my opinion, the combination of our own DNA, plus the DNA of our gut microbes."

It would be naive to think we carry around so much microbial material without it interacting or having any effect on our bodies at all.

Science is rapidly uncovering the role the microbiome plays in digestion, regulating the immune system, protecting against disease and manufacturing vital vitamins.

Prof Knight said: "We're finding ways that these tiny creatures totally transform our health in ways we never imagined until recently."

It is a new way of thinking about the microbial world. To date, our relationship with microbes has largely been one of warfare.

-via BBC News, April 10, 2018

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cbirt · 4 months

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In 2023, bioinformatics discoveries have catalyzed immense progress across the life sciences landscape. These ground-breaking discoveries have provided insight into the complex workings of biological systems, processes, and disease states. From discovering new diagnostic markers to mapping the complexity of the brain, these innovations promise to transform medicine, evolution, and beyond. The pace of bioinformatics discoveries fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence heralds a new era of opportunity. In this article, we take a closer look at 10 of the best bioinformatics innovations of the year and their profound impact on the field of biology. Get ready for an exciting journey to the greatest discoveries in bioinformatics!

#1 CRACKING THE CODE OF MYSTERIOUS “Y” CHROMOSOME

Scientists have struggled for decades to sequence the enigmatic Y chromosome essential to male biology. The Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium presented the complete sequence of the human Y chromosome, encompassing 62,460,029 base pairs from the HG002 genome (T2T-Y). Thanks to new computational techniques, they can finally peer into its genetic blueprint and understand male infertility and human evolution like never before.

#bioinformatics #computational biology #ai #machine learning #drug discovery #genomics #omics

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petervintonjr · 9 months

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Meet the unsung contributor to revolutionary breakthroughs in treating polio, cancer, HPV, and even COVID-19: Henrietta Lacks. Born in 1920 Roanoke, Virginia, Henrietta's mother Eliza died when she was only four, and she was ultimately raised by her maternal grandfather in Clover, Virginia. Henrietta worked as a tobacco farmer and attended a segregated school until the age of 14, when she gave birth to a son, Lawrence. A daughter, Elsie, was born three years later --to compound the family's difficulties, Elsie had cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Henrietta and her now-husband David Lacks moved to Turner Station (now Dundalk), Maryland where David had landed a job with a nearby steel plant. At the time Turner Station was one of the oldest African-American communities in Baltimore County and there was sufficient community support for the family to buy a house and produce three more children.

In 1951 at the age of 31, Henrietta died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of cervical cancer, mere months after the birth of the family's youngest son. But before her death --and without her or her family's consent-- during a biopsy two tumour cell samples were taken from Henrietta's cervix and sent to Johns Hopkins researchers. Hernietta's cells carried a unique trait: an ability to rapidly multiply, producing a new generation every 24 hours; a breakthrough that no other human cell had achieved. Prior to this discovery, only cells that had been transformed by viruses or genetic mutations carried such a characteristic. With the prospect of now being able to work with what amounted to the first-ever naturally-occurring immortal human cells, researchers created a patent on the HeLa cell line but hid the donor's true identity under a fake name: Helen Lane.

It is no exaggeration to state that in the 70 years since her death, Henrietta's cells have been bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by thousands of laboratories; with her cells being used as a baseline in as many as 74,000 different studies (including some Nobel Prize winners). Her cells have even been sent into space to study the effects of microgravity, and were instrumental in the Human Genome Project. While no actual law (or even a code of ethics) necessarily required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a terminal patient, there was a very clear Maryland state law on the books that forbade tissue removal from the dead without permission, throwing the situation into something of a legal grey area. However because Henrietta was poor, minimally educated, and Black, this standard was quietly (and easily) circumvented and she was never recognized for her monumental contributions to science and medicine ...and her family was never compensated. The family remained unaware of Henrietta's contribution until 1975, when the HeLa line's provenance finally became public. Henrietta had been buried in an unmarked grave in the family cemetery in Clover, Virginia but in 2010 a new headstone was donated and dedicated, acknowledging her phenomenal contribution. That same year the John Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research established a new Henrietta Lacks Memorial lecture series. A statue of Lacks was commissioned in 2022, to be erected in Lacks's birthplace of Roanoke, Virginia --pointedly replacing a previous statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which had been removed following nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd.

Dive into The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, originally published in 2011 and subsequently adapted into an HBO movie in 2017, starring Oprah Winfrey as Henrietta's daughter Deborah and Renee Elise Goldberry as Henrietta. (And yes, this book has been challenged and banned in more than one school district.)

#black lives matter #henrietta lacks #johns hopkins #cell biology #hela #stem cell #translational research #genomics #teachtruth #dothework

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beesacademia · 5 months

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gloomy genomics sesh 🧬

#oxford #studyblr #uni studyblr #university of oxford #library #new study blog #study blog #biology #genomics #genetics #biology student #biology studyblr

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botanizing · 2 years

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Categorizing the Uncategorizable

(or, the divine is stored in the infinite mystery of life on earth)

I swear this is about lichen genomics but it’s not not about gender

Recently I was asked “What do you think of species described only from DNA?” That is to say, species not morphologically distinguishable from others but when tested genetically, show up with results different enough that some people have decided they count as a different entity.

Over and over again in my (short) career as a biologist I keep running across the question “What is a species, really?” It doesn’t seem like something that would be the subject of ongoing debate. We should be able to tell the difference between different types of creatures, right? Even if they look similar, if they can’t breed and produce fertile offspring, they are not considered to be the same species. This works for most vertebrates, as far as I know, but a brief glance at botany makes everything infinitely more complicated. Different species of plants are absolutely capable of interbreeding and producing fertile hybrids (that’s how we get so many fun cultivars to grow in our gardens). And by the time one considers lichens, the concept of “species” is more of a vague suggestion, or a shorthand we’ve all agreed to use while acknowledging its drawbacks.

Lichens are always already at least two species – a fungus and a photosynthetic partner (green algae or cyanobacteria) – combined into one “body” that looks unlike either partner would if grown separately. They are recognizable entities, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are always visible in cross section, or in the genomic data. And this is without even mentioning the myriad species of other fungi and bacteria simmering in the lichenological stew. The lichenological community decided to use the Latin name of the fungal component to refer to the whole lichen, since the fungus makes up the majority of the biomass and seemed to determine the morphology while the photosynthetic partner was more or less along for the ride. The same species of alga is also known to partner with different fungi to form different lichens, which was taken as evidence of its relative non-selectiveness versus the fungal partner’s specificity (something that has more recently been called into question). Regardless of one’s stance on the fungi-centric model, we can all agree that the idea that one genome=one species does not apply to lichens.

So why do we call lichens “species” anyway? Well, what else would we call them? They are distinct entities that live and reproduce and play particular roles in an ecosystem. They can be identified by their distinctive morphological features. And when so much work in biology relies upon knowing “what lives where”, we need to have a name for the “what”. So, we’ve given imperfect names to capture some aspect of our infinitely interconnected world. This is something we need to do, for the sake of communication.

But just like words can never quite capture elusive and complex feelings, grouping a set of organisms together and calling them a Latin binomial will never quite express the reality. We are only human, after all, and as much as we learn about the world around us, we are limited in the scope of what we can understand. I don’t think we will ever unravel every mystery in the natural world, and that’s not a bad thing. The more we learn, the more questions we have. What I’m getting at is that we can never have an omniscient view of every single biological interaction ever. We research and study and we get an approximation. It might be a very good approximation that answers our questions and contributes to our body of knowledge, but it is still an approximation impacted by the limits of our perception and our implicit biases.

The way I see it, using our human perspective to apply categories to the natural world is always a functional endeavor. We do not name lichens because we think this is what the lichen would call itself, or even what god would call the lichen. We name them because we are interested in them and we need something to call them when we talk to other humans. Endangered species lists are just that – lists of species. We wouldn’t be able to protect rare lichens without assigning them a species and putting them on the list. There will always be exceptions, and edges, and individuals that don’t quite fit. Evolution is always happening; we see populations that are not quite different enough to be their own species, but we can tell that one day, thousands or millions of years from now, maybe they will be. What do we name these? Perhaps a subspecies or a variety, perhaps not. The important thing is not that we’ve discovered the One Truth of the Universe, but that we are close enough to accomplish what we need to accomplish.

But are DNA sequences enough to define a species? I think not. We must consider again not what a species is, but why we describe species. We do not describe species for the sake of making up a name for a slightly different DNA sequence, we do it to categorize an entity we are interested in. If two lichens look the same, contain the same chemicals, and fill the same ecological niche, are they really different? And if they are, are they different enough to matter?

This is not an indictment of the act of naming species, or a call to stop trying to study and understand what appears unknown and unknowable. It is simply an encouragement to think more critically about categories and why we categorize. Why is it important to tell these two things apart? In what context would it become important? What would it look like to treat them the same? How much more can we learn from thinking consciously and openmindedly about what we mean when we say “this is a species”?

#lichen #lichens #lichenology #lichensplaining #science #biology #species concept #species #evolution #taxonomy #genomics #gender

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heckthis-heckallofthis · 1 month

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• Civilian cell mitosis guide •

Step 1: Input Genome data into the replicator. If you have done it correctly it will create a "Ding" noise

Step 2: Provide at least one sample of your physical self to the chute in the replicator, this can be anything from your hair, fingernails, spit, cytoplasm, cell membrane or anything of the sorts.

Step 3: Ensure the sentriols are in the right placements (Opposite to each other in the tank) before providing the replicator its spindle fiber. The spindle fiber should go in through the small hole next to the genome input.

Step 4: Closely examine the replicator while in it's metaphase and anaphase. If one or more chromosomes do not split properly to their designated location, call the T cells immediately

Step 5: Once metaphase and anaphase go through successfully, wait 20-22 hours for the replicator to complete mitosis.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why cancer cells are bad for the body and how to spot them before they complete the mitosis cycle

Why cancer cells are bad for the body:

Cancer cells have the possibility to go rogue and cause chaos by replicating outside of the mitosis program, multiplying quicker than other cells in the body.

Cancer cells also hoard nutrients and starve other places in the body, causing malnutrition and slowing metabolism in other areas of the body while ensuring their own kind can replicate as much as possible

Cancer cells also do not heed the programmed cell death, ensuring their numbers always increase.

Worst of all, cancer cells are not limited to one area of the body, if they successfully go through metastasis, they can and will inflict the whole body with cancer, almost guaranteeing the body's end.

How to spot a cancer cell:

Does the cell inside your replicator look exactly like you? If not, that is a cancer cell.

Does the cell have extra features that a normal cell like you doesn't have (e.g. 3 eyes, 4 arms, 2 heads, ect.)? If yes, that is a cancer cell

Does the cell have any deformities on their physical features (e.g. odd colored eye(s), discolored cell membrane, unusually proportioned limbs, ect.)? If yes, that is a cancer cell

Does the cell struggle to do basic things you can do (e.g. walk, respond to outside stimulus, talk, ect.)? If yes, that is a cancer cell

Does the cell oxidize and consume nutrients unusually quicker than you do, and request more nutrients be delivered? If yes, that is a cancer cell

If one or more of these apply to your newly replicated/currently replicating daughter cell, call the T cells immediately. Do not hesitate, do not panic, do not worry. If you are unable to contact the T cells, quickly let any immunocyte in your area know of your situation and they will help you. Do not risk the body's safety because of your mistake.

T cell contact: 247-Helper-T-82

#i love writing world building things #the genome input is more of a safety precaution/password thingy than a necessity #bc if u arent a civilian cell/civilian cell in the wrong place then you could just use the replicator and do bad things #cells at work #hataraku saibou #this required a lot of my biology knowledge fr

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dailycupofcreativitea · 1 year

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This is a shameless pitch for my field of work but if you like biology and you like coding...consider bioinformatics as a career 👀 Especially if you live in the US, as it's well-known for its bionformatics scene.

#musings #bioinformatics #stem #computer science #python #biology #i was just thinking about how not a lot of people know that a career like bioinformatics exists #hence my little post #most people i tell my job too just look at me confused like they didnt realize you could mix these fields #and a lot of people studying biology forget about how important it is to have a quantitative skill like math or computer science or physics #simply because the programs dont teach those skills #to do any sort of custom data analysis its important to have quantitative skills #and if you're passionate about genomics especially...and dna and the genome...then this may be the field for you!#good money especially in the states #of course a graduate degree is needed #masters minimum phd preferred #i have a masters

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thespongelady99 · 7 months

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So I’ve been mildly obsessed with glass sponges and other deep sea sponges lately, and thought I would share a few cool things I’ve read about them recently. All of this having come out within the past year or two!

Firstly, let’s talk about the first ever glass sponge genome sequenced, just last year! Sponges are horribly underrepresented in sequencing, so new sponge genomes are a big deal!

This paper found that the O. minuta genome is quite small compared to other eukaryotes, and is lacking a functional Wnt pathway, which was initially thought to be required for multicellularity in animals!

Another glass sponge was sequenced just earlier this year, and also had a fairly small genome (though not as small as O. minuta).

In this paper, they found that A. vastus contains close to 2500 nested genes, which are genes whose entire sequence is located inside the reading frame of another gene! In addition, this species lacks genes for proteins involved in silica assimilation in other sponges, suggesting the use of a different pathway.

Finally, my personal favorite is this paper that used metagenomic sequencing to investigate the microbiome of a newly discovered glass sponge:

Sponge microbiomes are a topic near and dear to my heart so I was super excited to stumble across this! Overall, an ammonia oxidizing archaea was the most common species found, with a sulfur oxidizing bacteria being the second most common, suggesting these sponges and their microbiomes likely play important roles in nutrient cycling! In addition, genes known as eukaryotic-like proteins, common in sponge symbionts, were found in over half of the bacteria sequenced, meaning they likely have a stable symbiotic relationship with the sponge.

Overall, it’s incredible how much knowledge about glass sponge genomes and microbiomes has come out recently, and how much these findings may change our whole view of eukaryotic genomes and what is deemed a “necessary” gene.

#marine life #marine biology #sponges #glass sponges #deep sea #biology #genetics #genomics #science

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