In fact, it was research conducted on sea urchins over a hundred years ago that led to one of the breakthroughs of modern biology, when Theodor Boveri discovered in 1902 that normal development requires that every cell in an embryo have a full set of chromosomes carrying the genetic or inherited material for an organism.
One reason sea urchins have been so popular with scientists is that they are easy to work with. They can live in a laboratory comfortably, release their eggs readily, and have transparent embryos. That makes it easy to observe their fertilization and development, which is surprisingly similar to human embryonic development in some ways. As Dr. Coffman says, "Studying gene function and regulation in early sea urchin embryos is relatively easy compared with other model organisms such as mice, and much faster."
Sea urchins are also incredibly fecund. A single female discharges millions of eggs. In fact, most of an urchin's body mass consists of its reproductive organs, and that's what people are consuming when they eat the "roe" from a sea urchin.
At first glance, sea urchins seem to be inanimate, although people who have been around sea urchins know that the spines will move quickly in reaction to a light touch. The genome project, however, revealed that urchins have genes encoding some of the same sensory proteins involved in vision and hearing in humans. Yet the sea urchin has no eyes and ears, at least as we know them. Some of the visual sensory proteins are localized to an appendage known as the tube foot, and probably function in sensory processes there.
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Contact: Jerilyn Bowers
jeri@mdibl.org
207-288-3147
Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory
9-Nov-2006