Rising in prominence within the club of laboratory science model organisms, alongside such stars as various white mice (and rats), Planarian flatworms, the mustard plant Arabidopsis (and the tobacco plant), and Drosophila fruit flies, is the ubiquitous little pond-flittering water flea, Daphnia pulex. This I didn’t know as a model animal, although surely I’d run across it somewhere. Plenty of other people are getting to know Daphnia a little better this morning. It already is heavily used for study of its diverse reactions to changing environments. Now its genome has been sequenced and found to be quite large – in fact a record-holder -, dynamic, and loaded with novel genes unlike any seen in any other creature. Yet its genome has little of that mysterious stuff called junk DNA. It is the first crustacean genome in the ledger. So says an int’l team in today’s Science. The authors call this their flagship paper, but at their site (in Grist) they list 50 other papers they’ve published on details too numerous to fit on one flagship. Indiana U., headquarters of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium, splashed the news wider via press release. A few other universities and the NSF did too. Several outlets wrote it up.
First I saw of it was this morning long after diligent reporters did so, via Science‘s own SciPak corner for its embargoed stuff at AAAS’s EurekAlert! service. Any creature that, upon merely smelling a potential predator, can promptly grow “tail spines, helmets, and neck teeth” is hard to turn away without a closer look.
It provides a chance for science reporters to show what they can do as story tellers, entertainers, and explainers. Such a paper has no particular or urgent policy implications one can think up beyond justification of public money for basic science. Immediate impacts for the person on the street – even though this creature is a barometer of pollution’s effects – are nothing compared to development of a good malaria vaccine or safe weight-loss pill or something of that sort. Write on.
Stories:
- Cosmos – Elizabeth Finkel: Sequencing Daphnia ; The news may be the genome, but Finkel makes the right call. Introduce the little jitterbugs first, then get to the news part.
- NPR – Joe Placa: Tiny Water Flea Clocks in Record Number of Genes ; Promptly, he explains why early naturalists called them fleas. They turn red sometimes. Looked like they were bloodsuckers. But no, they make their own hemoglobin.
- Toronto Star – Debra Black: This flea has more genes than we do – and why it matters ; Pedestrian hed, but story with a beguiling intr0 to the main author, who has been nuts about these things since high school.
- USA Today/ScienceFair blog – Dan Vergano: Water flea genome makes leap from lab ;
- Irish Independent – John von Radowitz: Water flea has most complex genome ;
- LiveScience via MSNBC – Stephanie Pappas: Tiny water flea’s promising role: environmental monitor; Not sure here, but I think the writer mistook reference to “duplicated genes” to mean just two copies. But am unsure of that – the paper is, no surprise, hard on lay eyes. Pappas’s story has a nic,e if unclear in precise meaning, term for the creature: the Swiss Army knife of crustaceans.
- CBC (Canada) Sharon Oosthoek: Tiny water flea, many genes ;
- Nature News – Virginia Gewin: Water flea genome offers revolution in toxicity testing ; Technically a high water mark among this group of stories, and best on institutional context.
- Wired.UK – Mark Brown: Tiny water flea has more genes than any other creature so far ; Good enough, but I’d argue against calling it “near microscopic.” They’re pretty big – larger than regular fleas. More like good-sized ants. They tend to be translucent, but one can see them with the naked eye. (But they’re not green and red like in this micrograph.)
- Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Copious Genes of Tiny Water Flea Promise a Leap in Understanding Environmental Toxins;
*UPDATES
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman (Feb. 13) : Water flea vital to our survival ; Perlman gets off the daily news frenetic pace and writes a reflection on the water flea and modern science (’tis likely, one thinks, his breaking-news story got held so he buffed it to run as a Sunday thinker in the ‘Insight” section).
- LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II (Feb. 5) :Tiny water flea has longest genome ;
– end updates –
There are others out there I could track. Perhaps I missed it, but none that I saw tell readers how much this effort cost in grant money, public and private. Somebody must have a rough count. Our society has curmudgeons who resent their taxes going for things that can be made to seem like mere entertainment for intellectuals who they’d prefer to see working on somebody else’s dime. This must’ve cost millions, many and perhaps most of them federal dollars. So somebody might as well find out the number and get it over with. Otherwise we’ll read, during elections to come, of the $X-travagant amount spent for DNA paternity testing of water fleas (which is how an infamous, yet important, study of grizzly and black bear DNA got zinged).
Grist for the Mill:
Indiana University Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; UC Davis Press Release; Univ. New Hampshire Press Release ; Woods Hole Marine Biological Lab Press Release ; Daphnia Consortium bibliography ; ;
YouTube: Lots of videos of this things, some with fancy music. I like this one. It looks like a jumpy flea. But it needs a soundtrack.
– Charlie Petit
Image source ;
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