Image credit: Mary Swartz / Johann Eberhart / University of Texas at Austin
Organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, to do amazing things: they send and receive signals such as the songs of birds, allowing them to see other electric fish by species, sex, and even individuals. A new Science Advances study explains how small genetic mutations cause electric fish to mutate. These findings may also help scientists identify genetic mutations that cause certain human diseases.
Evolution used a genetic peculiarity of fish to create genes. All fish have duplicate genes that produce small muscle motors called sodium channels. The electrical nerves dissolved a gene from the sodium channel in the muscle to develop organs and opened it to other cells. Small motors tend to contract muscle and are also meant to produce electrical signals, and voila! A new organ with excellent skills was born.
“This is exciting because we see how small genetic mutations can completely change where they are expressed,” said Harold Zakon, a professor of neuroscience and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study.
In a new article, researchers at UT Austin and Michigan State University described the discovery of a small portion of this sodium channel gene (about 20 characters long) that controls how a gene is expressed in any cell. · Lula. They have confirmed that this control circuit can be completely replaced or lost in electric fish. And that’s why one of the two sodium genes gets trapped in the muscles of an electric fish. But the effects go beyond the appearance of electric fish.
“If they open the gene to both the tissue and the electrical organ, all the new things that happen to the organ’s sodium channels will pass into the muscle,” Zakon said. “Therefore, it was important to differentiate gene expression in an organ, where we can change it without damaging the muscles.”
There are two groups of electric fish in the world: one in Africa and the other in South America. The researchers found that fish species in Africa had mutations in the control area, while fish species in South America were completely lost. Both groups found the same solution for the development of the organs: to lose the genetic expression of the sodium channel in the muscle, although from two different paths.