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For decades, the possibility that animals other than man show signs of intelligence or are capable of expressing feelings has been the subject of intense scientific debate. This week, without going any further, the journal ‘Science’ publishes a study on the matter, and the conclusion is that even invertebrates, and not just mammals, are capable of processing feelings and feel emotions that drive them to adopt certain behaviors and behaviours.
Anyone who has seen on Netflix ‘What the octopus taught me’, the exceptional documentary in which the South African filmmaker Craig Foster recounts the day-to-day of his relationship with one of these animals, will be more than clear that neither intelligence nor
Emotions are something unique to our species.
[¿Son los pulpos una forma de vida extraterrestre?].
Something that seems to have been demonstrated by an international team of researchers led by Nikolaus Rajewsky, from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, whose study suggests that the brains of octopuses and other cephalopods were capable of developing greater complexity in the same way that The brains of vertebrates, including humans, did. Octopuses, according to the study, published in biorxiv, use many more RNA regulators, microRNAs or miRNAs, to control the activity of their genes.
“We show – the researchers explain – that the main RNA innovation of soft-bodied cephalopods is a massive expansion of the miRNA gene repertoire. The only comparable miRNA expansions occurred, surprisingly, in vertebrates.” The miRNA, according to the study, is deeply related to the appearance of complex brains.
a very complex brain
The high degree of intelligence shown by octopuses, squids and cuttlefish is something that has intrigued biologists for decades, mainly because a similar cognitive level is not found in any mollusk or among invertebrates in general. Intelligence requires complex brains, but how did the brains of these animals achieve that complexity?
Rajewsky and his team found that the large amount of miRNA in cephalopods, much higher than that found in other invertebrates, is comparable to the amount present in vertebrates. In particular, more than 50 miRNAs arose in the ancestors of squid and octopus, and have been conserved since these lineages diverged more than 300 million years ago. Such survival suggests that their role is important. And it is intriguing that no other invertebrate developed so many miRNAs.
The importance of microRNA
There are different types of RNA molecules. The main ones are known as messenger RNAs and are copies of genes that carry specific instructions to the ‘factories’ that produce proteins inside a cell. In contrast, the much smaller miRNAs do not code for proteins, but they can regulate the activity of many different genes, which they normally do by interacting with many different messenger RNAs.
According to the study, having a wide range of different miRNAs would allow cephalopods to generate more types of neurons and, therefore, be the basis of greater brain complexity. The researchers haven’t shown that this is exactly the case, but they did find that many of these miRNAs are especially active in the developing brains of baby octopuses. A finding that other scientists have considered ‘fascinating’.
“We propose -it can be read in the article- that miRNAs are closely related to the evolution of complex brains in animals”. The results of the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed (the step before publication in a scientific journal) could very well be the answer to the impressive brain of octopuses. In any case, and there is no doubt about that, it brings them a little closer to us, the humans.
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