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Asked by tekerstrev66 to Abyssal Grenadier, Baltic clam, Brachiopod, Common starfish, Naval Shipworm, Orkney vole, Scottish Crossbill, Snake Pipefish, Twisted-wing fly on 2 Dec 2017.
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Common Starfish answered on 2 Dec 2017:
Starfish (and other echinoderms) have “mutable” collagenous tissue in their body wall – that’s why if you pick up a starfish they sometimes feel stiff and they sometimes feel soft.
When starfish lose an arm, the collagenous tissue at the base of their arm softens so much that the arm falls off.
All animals have collagen but there is something very special about the collagen in starfish and other echinoderms. By sequencing the genome of the common starfish we could determine the DNA sequences of all the genes that encode collagen proteins in starfish – and in this way we could gain new insights into mechanisms of “mutable” collagenous tissue.
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Abyssal Grenadier answered on 4 Dec 2017:
We have lots of cool unique features!
We can survive under high water pressure. At the moment we know that we store a lot of an enzyme called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) which helps to keep our cells happy and stop them from being crushed by the pressure.
We also live in the complete darkness, except bioluminescence which is light produced by some bacteria that live in some deep sea species, but we can still see these flashes of light.
We can go veeeeeery long periods of time without eating so we have become very good at storing energy in our bodies. And we can also swim really slowly to help keep our energy stores high too.
Because it is dark we can’t hunt for our food using our eyes so we also have a very strong sense of smell that allows us to find food.
At the moment we don’t know all the genes that help us live in such an extreme environment! That’s why we would love to have our genome sequenced so we can start to understand how animals can live in such a difficult environment. Because we are closely related to cod it would be really cool to compare our genome to the genome of a cod to see what lets us live deeper! This could be really valuable in understand fish like cod as well as the abyssal grenadier. -
Terebratulina Retusa answered on 7 Dec 2017:
One interesting fact?
Brachiopods are boring!
How is that interesting? Because no other animal has sat there in the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years,- and done nothing. A brachiopod from the bottom of Loch Fyne today is pretty much indistinguishalbe from a one hundred million year old fossil.
The reason for sequencing the brachiopod is to ask a simple one word question,- why?
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Snake Pipefish answered on 7 Dec 2017:
Hi there! Snake pipefish are the only true oceanic species of all pipefishes, seahorses and sea dragons. They are not dependent on coastal habitats like all the others, although you can find them along the coasts of Europe, you can also find them in the open ocean. Of all European pipefishes, snake pipefish reaches the most northern latitudes, all the way up to Svalbard in northern Norway. They also have a basic form of paternal care, compared to seahorses, so instead of having a brood pouch, they simply glue their eggs onto their bellies and kind of parade them for weeks while caring for them. Despite looking basic, they are able to provide nutrients to the embryos through the skin on their belly, much like a placenta. Studying their DNA would help us understand their unique adaptations as well as compare them to more evolved species and start figuring out how their form of paternal care evolved.
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Twisted-wing Fly answered on 8 Dec 2017:
Our animal – the twisted-wing fly – has a very unusual life-cycle with males winged and free-living as adults, while females spend their entire lives as maggot-like parasitoids in other insects. Their DNA will tell us which insects are their closest relatives.
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