2023-08-11 18:15:20
Very few animals are transparent. One of them is the one shown in the photograph.
It is a female of the species Brachionus manjavacas.
Animals like this are known as rotifers.
The specimen in the photo is only 350 micrometers long, about the size of a grain of sand.
The hair-like structures on the far right are used by the animal for swimming and for obtaining food.
The four spherical structures on the far left are developing eggs.
These unique animals have recently been the object of study by a team led by Haiyang Feng, from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States.
Having a transparent body is perfect to be able to observe what happens inside. The field of biology has greatly benefited from animals such as zebrafish, whose temporal transparency and ease of genetic manipulation have enabled much research that would otherwise have been unfeasible.
Traditionally, the potential for biological research that rotifers have has been severely limited by the difficulty of genetically manipulating them.
(Photo: Michael Shribak / Kristin Gribble)
That situation may start to change now, as Feng and his colleagues have found in their recent research a much easier and more reliable way to genetically engineer rotifers.
The study is titled “Highly efficient CRISPR-mediated gene editing in a rotifer”. And it has been published in the academic journal PLoS Biology. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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