Sea Urchins Made to Order: Scientists Make Transgenic Breakthrough
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Consider the sea urchin. Specifically, the painted urchin: Lytechinus pictus, a prickly Ping-Pong ball from the eastern Pacific Ocean.
The species is a smaller and shorter-spined cousin of the purple urchins devouring kelp forests. They produce massive numbers of sperm and eggs that fertilize outside of their bodies, allowing scientists to watch the process of urchin creation up close and at scale. One generation gives rise to the next in four to six months. They share more genetic material with humans than fruit flies do and can't fly away-in short, an ideal lab animal for the developmental biologist.
Scientists have been using sea urchins to study cell development for roughly 150 years. Despite urchins' status as super reproducers, practical concerns often compel scientists to focus their work on more easily accessible animals: mice, fruit flies, worms.
Scientists working with mice, for example, can order animals online with the specific genetic properties they are hoping to study-transgenic animals, whose genes have been artificially tinkered with to express or repress certain traits.
Researchers working with urchins typically have to spend part of their year collecting them from the ocean.
"Can you imagine if mouse researchers were setting a mousetrap every night, and whatever it is they caught is what they studied?" said Amro Hamdoun, a professor at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
[...] In March, Hamdoun's lab published a paper on the bioRxiv preprint server demonstrating the successful insertion of a piece of foreign DNA-specifically, a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish-into the genome of a painted urchin that passed the change down to its offspring.
The result is the first transgenic sea urchin, one that happens to glow like a Christmas bulb under a fluorescent light. (The paper has been submitted for peer review.)
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