EMBARGO Friday 25 November 1900 GMT | Saturday 26 November 0600 AEDT Our glorious little blue marble of a planet is filled with an astonishingly diverse array of lifeforms, but some are definitely more peculiar than others.
"There was indeed a lot of RNA editing going on, but not in areas that we believe to be of interest,"What the team found was that octopuses have a lot of microRNA, or miRNA. They found 164 miRNA genes grouped into 138 miRNA families in the common octopus, and 162 miRNA genes grouped into the same 138 families in the California two-spot octopus. And 42 of the families were new, mostly in the brain and neural tissue.
miRNA are non-coding RNA molecules that are heavily involved in regulating gene expression, binding to larger RNA molecules to help cells fine-tune the proteins they create. The fact that these miRNA families were preserved in the octopus, as were the RNA binding sites, suggests that they still play a role in octopus biology, although the scientists don't yet know what that role is, or which cells the miRNAs are involved with.
"This is the third-largest expansion of microRNA families in the animal world, and the largest outside of vertebrates," says biologist"To give you an idea of the scale, oysters, which are also mollusks, have acquired just five new microRNA families since the last ancestors they shared with octopuses – while the octopuses have acquired 90!"
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