Joint regeneration
In the movie The Revenant, the main character cut up the carcass of a horse to protect himself from the cold. Let's develop the situation a little. Imagine that you are badly injured. But there is one extravagant way to survive – this is to merge your damaged flesh with another wounded person, ultimately becoming a new creation based on the human body. Scientists have discovered this amazing ability in ctenophores, which can fuse together, combining the nervous and digestive systems.
This is a curious phenomenon, both in the natural world and in laboratory research. In particular, the evolution of artificial intelligence is closely related to the understanding of how the brain works. And the symbiosis of these two directions in itself promises certain potential benefits to humanity. And the debate around “how ethical is this” and “is it worth doing” is groundless. The world is developing, and science is coming into closer contact with topics that were previously only script conditions for films and books. Read more about such “border contacts”, community materials tell. Subscribe to be the first to receive strange articles!
Unite to survive
Ctenophores are soft-bodied marine invertebrates that move using hair-like cilia. They are relatively simple creatures, although they do have muscles, a nervous system, and sensory organs. But the fragility of their bodies makes studying the organism difficult, so there's still a lot we don't know about them.
That's why scientists were surprised discovering a new superpower of this type. Moreover, the discovery itself, as often happens, was made by accident. In a tank of ctenophores in the lab, the team one day spotted a particularly large and deformed specimen. But oddly enough, she seemed to have two apical organs – a sort of sensory structure – instead of a normal nervous system, as well as two anuses.
Scientists suspected that they were actually two individuals that had somehow merged after being wounded. To investigate this phenomenon, scientists removed part of the lobes from several ctenophores and placed them in close pairs. And, of course, in 90% of cases, the wounded individuals united, forming one organism in just one night.
Collective regeneration
The fusion seemed to be seamless, and when the researchers stimulated one lobe, the whole body responded. This suggests that the creatures have merged to the point of integrating the nervous system.
We were amazed to find that mechanical stimulation applied to one side of the fused ctenophore resulted in synchronized contraction of the muscles on the other side.
Kei Jokura, co-author of the study.
Taking a closer look, the researchers found that the two halves of the Frankenstein jelly exhibited spontaneous movements during the first hour or so after merging. But after this, the combined parts better understood the principles of how to coordinate their movements, so that after about two hours, 95% of their muscle contractions were synchronized.
From reaction to nutrition
The team also tested the digestive tracts of these combined ctenophores. They fed one individual using fluorescently tagged food and watched the particles pass through the mouth. In the end, it became clear that both digestive tracts retained functionality, but in the process of work they changed places.
This is definitely an intriguing ability for the animal kingdom, and may have evolved as a survival strategy to save two injured jellyfish that otherwise would not have been able to survive on their own. But it could also be a byproduct of their lack of a trait that appeared later in the evolutionary branch.
Later life forms have a so-called recognition system that specializes in figuring out which cells are ours and which are foreign. This is an important difference that allows our immune system to attack invading viruses and bacteria – although we pay a price in the form of tissue rejection in organ transplants.
Ignoring the stranger
But ctenophores don't have this ability, so when two wounded members of the species meet each other, they simply adopt the new friend's cells as their own. Research into how they do this opens up new possibilities in the field of regenerative medicine.
Recognition mechanisms are related to the immune system, and the fusion of nervous systems is closely related to regeneration research. Unraveling the molecular mechanisms underlying this fusion could advance these critical areas of research.
Kei Jokura, co-author of the study.
Diametrically departing from the topic. Having realized the fact of their mortality and armed with the desire to extend the functional part of life, part of humanity looks at transhumanism and the singularityas if for some good. The moment when technology and organics merge together, creating a new being. Not a person, but something more. And this is no longer a merging of species, but something more.
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