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In A World First, Scientists Change Snail's Shell-Coiling Direction With CRISPR

dimanche 26 mai 2019, 21:46 , par Slashdot
'Most snails are 'righties'. Now scientists have found genes that can change the shell coiling direction,' writes the New York Times. ( Non-paywalled version here )

Suren Enfiajyan shares their report:
Studying these snails offers clues to the evolution of body plans in many animals. It also could be important for understanding why up to 10 percent of people are born with sinus inversus, a condition where their internal organs are flipped like a lefty snail's shell. Now scientists are turning to Crispr -- the powerful gene editing tool -- to figure out why some snails turn out this way. A team in Japan led by Reiko Kuroda, a chemist and biologist, has successfully used the technique to manipulate a single gene responsible for shell direction in a species of great pond snail.

The research, published last week in the journal Development, offers definitive proof of the genetic underpinnings of handedness in this species, and could lead to clues about left- and right-handed mysteries in other organisms. 'Ten years ago you might not imagine there were any similarities in the left/right asymmetry of a snail and the left/right asymmetry of humans. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that is the case,' said Angus Davison, an evolutionary geneticist, who has studied chiral pond snails, but was not a part of Dr. Kuroda's study...

In the current study, Dr. Kuroda and Masanori Abe used Crispr to edit out the Lsdia1 gene, and then raised the resulting mutant snails. Confirming previous work, they showed that even in the first embryonic cell, genetic information started picking sides. And by the third cleavage, when four cells become eight, the mutant cells were rotating in the opposite direction of what is expected. These snails grew into lefties, and so did their offspring. Without two working copies of Lsdia1, snails can survive with Lsdia2 -- but their shells won't coil to the right.

In the article Dr. Davison says that there's still more research to do. 'Unfortunately, snail research doesn't move quickly.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9D7HHdQHBFE/in-a-world-first-scientists-change-snails-shell...
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