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The ocean windflower is an oddball : half - plant and half - beast , at least when it come to its transmissible computer code , new enquiry suggest .
The sea creature ’s factor appear more like those of animals , but the regulatory code that mold whether those genes are expressed resembles that in plants , accord to a written report published Tuesday ( March 18 ) in the journal Genome Research .
The sea anemone is a genetic oddball, with some traits similar to plants and others more closely resembling higher animals.
What ’s more , the complicated connection of factor interaction found in the simple sea sea anemone resembles that plant in widely divergent , more complex animals .
" Since thesea anemoneshows a complex landscape of factor regulatory elements interchangeable to the fruit rainfly or other model beast , we consider that this precept of complex gene regulation was already present in the common ancestor of human , fly front and sea anemone some 600 million long time ago , " Michaela Schwaiger , a researcher at the University of Vienna , said in a affirmation . [ See sensational pic of Glowing Sea Creatures ]
A wide-eyed architectural plan
The size of it of an organism ’s genome does n’t correspond to how simple or complex that creature ’s body is , so some scientist conjecture that more complicated links and networks between genes made for more advanced eubstance programme .
Schwaiger and her colleagues at the University of Vienna analyze the genome of the ocean sea anemone , not only identifyinggenes that code for protein , but also assessing snip of code make out as promoters and enhancer , which help change state the volume up or down on gene construction .
The team found the ocean sea anemone ’s bare anatomy hide out a complicated internet of gene interactions , similar to those discover in higher animals such as fruit flies and humans . That belies the feeling that more complex factor networks always correlate with more elaborate organic structure plans , and also suggest theevolutionof this level of factor ordinance happen before sea anemones , fruit flies and humans diverged , about 600 million years ago .
Part plant
The squad also found the sea anemone had a 2nd level of regulation that intimately resembles one recover in plant . gene are transcribed or copied by a RNA , which is then used as a recipe to ramp up proteins . But tiny snippets of genetic cloth called microRNAs , which hold to the RNA copy , can stop the pace of protein assembly .
While plants and animals have microRNAs , they look and act very dissimilar , so researchers had strike they arose independently in the two kingdoms . Schwaiger and her colleagues found the microRNAs in the sea anemone have law of similarity to those found in both plants and animal .
That suggests these microRNAs probably develop before plants and creature diverge long ago , and provides an evolutionary link between plant and animal microRNA .
