Playing cephalopod: squid edit t

• cephalopod 头足类动物；软体动物

Squid[鱿鱼], like their cousins octopus[章鱼,八爪鱼] and cuttlefish[乌贼；墨斗鱼], are laden with[充满；负载着] special abilities.

They change colour, shoot ink and are highly intelligent to boot.

A paper in Nucleic Acids Research[核酸研究期刊], a journal, describes yet another squid super-power: they edit their own genetic information.

Hitherto it was thought that in animal cells, genetic editing was confined to the cell’s control centre, the nucleus.

ADAR2 is an enzyme[霉] involved in splicing[拼接], the process in the nucleus which creates alternative versions of a protein.

But when researchers looked for ADAR2 in long fin inshore squid, they found it was much more prevalent in squids’ axons (nerve-cell fibres which carry electrical signals) than their nuclei.

This means squid are doing the modifying outside the nucleus, allowing them to adjust the way their protein functions more finely.

In humans, axon[轴突] dysfunction is implicated in disorders of the nervous system such as Parkinson’s.

Squid-style engineering could be applied to new disease therapies.

Mar 28th 2020