"A wealth of knowledge of how embryos grow has come from studying sea urchin development," said Eaves. "The discovery that these young animals can clone themselves provides an exceedingly rare opportunity to examine how a growing animal can repeat its own early development using a part of its body."
Scattered earlier reports have observed that invertebrate larvae can spontaneously clone but Eaves and Palmer discovered this trait in three new echinoderm groups--sea cucumbers, sand dollars, and sea urchins--offering surprising new insight about chordate evolution. Larval cloning represents an intriguing new dimension to invertebrate life histories including the suggestion that clones may subsequently clone. The research is published in the current edition of the prestigious journal Nature.
The larvae of echinoderms (the group that includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, etc.) usually swim and feed for several months before transforming into a miniature adult. During this time some larvae form an outgrowth -- essentially a ball of tissue -- that pinches-off of the larval body and grows into a second, normal-looking larva--a clone.
One of the most remarkable parts about the research is that for more than 100 years, scientists may have observed larval asexual reproduction, but did not recognize what they saw, said Palmer. Even more remarkably, at least one early report of larval cloning was dismissed as an artifact of laboratory culture conditions.
"These data make it cle
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Contact: Phoebe Dey
phoebe.dey@ualberta.ca
780-492-0437
University of Alberta
10-Sep-2003