Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

[redqueen]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug

SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

(snip)

After giving the slugs an amino acid labeled with radioactive carbon, Pierce and his colleagues identified a radioactive product as chlorophyll a. The radioactively tagged compound appeared after a session of slug sunbathing but not after letting slugs sit in the dark. A paper with details of the work is scheduled to appear in the journal Symbiosis.

Zardus, who says that he tries to maintain healthy skepticism as a matter of principle, would like to hear more about how the team controlled for algal contamination. The possibilities for the borrowed photosynthesis are intriguing though, he says. Mixing the genomes of algae and animals could certainly complicate tracing out evolutionary history. In the tree of life, he said, the green sea slug “raises the possibility of branch tips touching.”

[enlightenment]

1. That's really interesting research (I don't understand a 100th of it).

And extra points to them for managing to make a photo of a floating sea slug look almost . . . cute!

[redqueen]

2. It's fascinating stuff.

Oops...forgot to include a pic. :P

[enlightenment]

4. That's okay - I'm sure you're adorable, too . . .

;)

Seriously, I have no grasp of the scientific particulars of these things. I understand only at the 'wow, that's interesting' level - but I'm not a fan of sea critters in general and slugs in particular, so it actually did impress me that they could take a photo of a slug that wasn't abhorrent!

I'm not sure what this apparent cross-over means, in the larger scheme of design, or what it suggests (in any way) beyond just being a really cool discovery. If you have a sense of it (and the patience to translate into biology for dummies for me) I'd love to learn a little more about the ramifications.

[redqueen]

5. Hah, all I have a sense of...

is the fascinatingness of the discovery. The means by which they found it doesn't seem exactly new. Seems kinda like the way they found out the source of the oxygen plants 'exhale'... but the idea that an animal has these plant organelles, or the genes related to photosynthesis, that's the WOW part. There are animals like the echidna or the platypus that have traits of both mammals and reptiles or whatever... but the animal with plant traits thing is definitely new.

[enlightenment]

6. I think I just found my new word for the week

'fascinatingness'! Love it!

I'll take your word for the rest, after looking up organelles (which didn't bother me) and echidna (which was embarrassing because I thought I had a better grasp of the animal world, at least).

I can do history. I'm good at that. The sciences . . . well, let's just say that I was still taking freshman biology my senior year of high school.

[sdfernando]

8. beware the POD people!

The invasion is imminent!

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Holy smokes!

[silverweb]

7. More proof of evolution?

My first reaction after "Wow, how cool is that?!" is -- how badly will this fuck with creationist fundies' heads?

Bad, bad, I know....

:evilgrin:

[NNadir]

9. Well, chloroplasts in eurcaryotic plants are known to be, like mitochondria,

inclusion organelles, free organisms ingested into other cells and living, symbiotically, ever since. Both mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own DNA.

So it's not entirely surprising to see this kind of thing.

But on a personal matter, how are you? I haven't seen you around for a long time.

How's your mom; did she recover OK? I hope so.

[redqueen]

13. She did!

She's still bad about watching her blood sugar but doing fine, thanks. :) And how are you? I see you now and again in the Lounge, but I tend to must lurk more often lately.

And yeah ... but what about the sea slug embryos with the genes related to photosynthesis? I admit I'm skeptical but I hope repeated experiments yield the same results. Mostly cause it's just neat, but also cause it might spark something in the minds of some of those fundies.

[NNadir]

14. I'm fine as well, as cantankerous as ever and trying to get INTO trouble.

I'm glad your Mom's OK. Moms are generally good things to keep, and I know, since I've had two and lost one.

I'm trying to kick the blogging habit - but sometimes I fall of the wagon. It's getting old and I'm too old to be jerking around.

He's not perfect, but I'm very happy with the President, and I feel he's doing what the best Presidents do, learning on the job, with emphasis on learning. He is the best President I can recall in my lifetime.

About the science...

One of the things that's real striking in evolutionary genetics is how often particular genomes show up in very diverse areas with very diverse functionalities.

I'm not an expert in evolutionary genetics of course, but if my memory serves me well, the only sequence that seems to really be mostly conserved over the eons seems to be SOD (super oxide dismutase) sequences and even these show some variance. (MS seems to involve one of these variances for instance.)

A lot of proteins are kinases, and it's the same game everywhere in a lot of cases, phosphorylation, followed by geometry changes, a little metal here, a little metal there.

I've been very interested in the reduction of carbon dioxide in past years, and I always try to do at least look at how it works in biological systems, since my favorite paradigm is the fact that we knew heavier objects can fly because birds, insects and bats are all heavier than air, and until we studied these kinds of beings, there was no way in hell to know how to design an aircraft.

Carbon dioxide is phosphorylated in photosynthesis, but I would not be surprised to learn that some other phosphorylating proteins that have historically done things quite different from photosynthesis have decended from photosynthetic codons, and now reverted to their long dead past.

But I don't know. I've seriously just scanned this work in a few minutes.

[pleah]

10. Very cool.

[Odin2005]

11. SWEET! Yay for Endosymbiosis!!!

[Control-Z]

12. Now that is something you would never hear

on a right wing site! LOL "Yay for Endosymbiosis!!!"