A Creature of the Sea Found the Secret to Immortality—and Humans Might Know How to Steal It
The animal kingdom contains a vast array of animals capability of remarkable regenerative abilities, but known are quite as adept at this healing task than sea-swelling Cnidarians, such as hydra, jellyfish, and sea anemones.
Scientists from the University of Vienna studied the genome of the scarlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) in an attempt to undercover its immortal abilities.
According to a new study, the scientists discovered possible multipotent stem cells in the anemone for the first time, which could point to how these creatures are able to successfully fight back against the ravages of time.
Homo sapiens have remarkable regenerative abilities—wounds heal, bone fractures “thread” back together, and some organs can even regrow from devastating injury—but none of these biological bonafides compares to the healing power of the humble starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis).
Located along the eastern coast of the U.S., with a few introduced populations scattered along the western U.S. coast and the southeast coast of Britain, this sea anemone is a member of the sea-dwelling phylum Cnidaria, which is well-known for its full-body regenerative abilities—so much so that some animals in this phylum, such as the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, are functionally immortal. Because of this ability to seemingly defy the aging process, these animals have figured prominently in anti-aging research.
Now, in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers from the University of Vienna have possibly identified small, multi-potent cells in scarlet sea anemones that basically allow cnidarians to continually drink from the proverbial fountain of youth. In humans, stems cells allow limited regeneration of certain cells in our body (which is why they’re central to the exploration of anti-aging therapies), however, other animals display much greater, whole-body regenerative abilities compared to us humans.
Because it can reproduce asexually (though it can multiply sexually as well) and can be raised easily in laboratory conditions, N. vectensis has quickly become the go-to species for studying the immortal abilities of cnidarians more broadly (a concept known as a “model organism”). While scientists have known that the scarlet sea anemone shows little to no signs of aging, they haven’t been able to identify stem cells that drive this unending youth mainly due to their extremely small size.
University of Vienna’s Ulrich Technau, the senior author of this new study, and his team used a new method called “single cell genomics” in the hunt for these missing stem cells. The scientists were able to discern the stem cell lineage of certain cells developed based on transcriptome profiles, which are a collection of mRNA transcripts.
“By combining single-cell gene expression analyses and transgenesis,” University of Vienna’s Andreas Denner, the first author of the study, said in a press statement. “We have now been able to identify a large population of cells in the sea anemone that form differentiated cells such as nerve cells and glandular cells and are therefore candidates for multipotent stem cells.”
The team looked specifically at highly-conserved (i.e. unchanged via evolution) genes nanos and piwi, which are regulatory proteins involved in stem cell differentiation as well as gametogenesis—the process of creating germ cells and gametes (sperm and eggs). When the team mutated the nanos2 gene using CRISPR gene scissors, they discovered that this protein was necessary for forming germ cells as well as somatic cells and likely appeared in nature around 600 million years ago.
Now that scientists have enticing stem cell candidates, future studies will delve deeper into the mechanisms that make cnidarians, such as the scarlet sea anemone, adept fighters against the ravages of aging that afflict nearly every other species on the planet.
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