#parhyale

From creepy crustacean to better biofuels (and regrowing a limb?)

Could this creature from the deep be a part of the answer to not one, but two of the major challenges in 21^st century bioscience?  

The top pic is the marine arthropod Parhyale hawaiensis, which, although looming large in this picture, is typically about 1mm long! But small size is no obstacle for scientists with huge ambitions – like finding out if humans could even regrow limbs. Parhyale can, and so researchers led by Dr Aziz Aboobaker at the University of Oxford have just sequenced this critter’s DNA and observed a few mutants along the way (second pic).

And lying undetected in this organism’s genome were the genes for digesting lignocellulose (that’s the posh term for ‘wood’). This is a big deal, because humans and 99.9% of other animals can’t digest wood, but it’s packed with energy. Engineering these wood-digesting genes into microbes could bring cheaper and better biofuels a step closer.

Images: Image: Anastasios Pavlopoulos and Igor Siwanowicz from HHMI Janelia Research Campus, published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Read the full paper here.