DOI: Archaeometry, 2025. 10.1111/arcm.70030 (About DOIs).
DOI: Journal of Medieval Historical past, 2025. 10.1080/03044181.2025.2546884 (About DOIs).
Snails with eyes that develop again
Credit score:
Alice Accorsi, UC Davis
It has been recognized since no less than the 18th century that some snails possess regenerative skills, comparable to backyard snails regrowing their heads after being decapitated. Golden apple snails can utterly regrow their eyes—and people eyes share many anatomical and genetic options with human eyes, in line with a paper revealed within the journal Nature Communications. That makes them a wonderful candidate for additional analysis in hopes of unlocking the key to that regeneration, with the last word aim of restoring imaginative and prescient in human eyes.
Snails are sometimes gradual to breed within the lab, however golden apple snails are an invasive species and thrive in that surroundings, per co-author Alice Accorsi, a molecular biologist on the College of California, Davis. The snails have “digital camera sort eyes”: a cornea, a lens to focus mild, and a retina comprised of hundreds of thousands of photoreceptor cells. There are as many as 9000 genes that appear to be concerned in regenerating an amputated eye within the snails, lowering right down to 1,175 genes by the twenty eighth day of the method, so full maturation of the brand new eyes would possibly take longer. It is not clear whether or not the brand new eyes can nonetheless course of mild so the snails can really “see,” which is a subject for additional analysis.
Accorsi additionally used CRISPR/Cas9 to mutate one gene specifically (pax6) in snail embryos as a result of it’s recognized to regulate mind and eye improvement in people, mice, and fruit flies. She discovered that apple snails with two non-functioning pax6 genes find yourself growing with out eyes, suggesting it’s also chargeable for eye improvement within the snails. The subsequent step is to determine whether or not this gene additionally performs a task within the snails’ capability to regenerate their eyes, in addition to different doubtlessly concerned genes.
DOI: Nature Communications, 2025. 10.1038/s41467-025-61681-6 (About DOIs).
Beautiful glowing succulents
Maybe you caught the launch final 12 months of the primary genetically modified glowing plant: Mild Bio’s green-hued “Firefly Petunia.” It is not a very brilliant glow and genetic engineering is dear, however it was nonetheless a stable step towards the long-term aim of making glow-in-the-dark vegetation for sustainable lighting. Scientists at South China Agricultural College got here up with a novel, cheaper method: injecting succulents with phosphorescent chemical substances akin to these utilized in business glow-in-the-dark merchandise, aka “afterglow luminescence.” They described the work in a paper revealed within the journal Matter.
