What is the relationship between the "trumpet worm" with amazing regenerative ability and humans?

When we first looked up at the starry sky, we couldn't help but imagine what was beyond the stars. But so far, we have found nothing. When we first looked through a microscope, our discovery was far beyond our imagination. Now, let's take a look at the trumpet worm!

Trumpet worms once aroused the curiosity of scientists. These single-celled organisms have complex body structures and amazing regenerative abilities. Their regeneration process is similar to some steps that promote the development of animal embryos. So until the middle of the 20th century, trumpet worms have always been interesting research objects, but research is not limited to interesting questions or hidden phenomena, but also needs to take into account practicality.

To many scientists, trumpet beetles are not suitable for experiments. They are difficult to cultivate partly because they are too large to fit into experimental equipment that can accommodate other organisms. Other more manageable ciliates such as Paramecium have become more popular as typical protozoa.

People have been studying this single-celled eukaryotic organism for a long time, but trumpet worms have not been forgotten. We just need to wait for the right tools to discover their mysteries. Researchers have spent hundreds of hours studying trumpet worms and even found them in a variety of environments.

This small ciliate keeps pulling on the cell membrane of the trumpet worm until it is destroyed. The bead-shaped nucleus and food vacuole flow out of the body of the trumpet worm, while the remaining cytoplasm, that is, the rest of the body's internal substances, are scattered around.

Despite the damage, the bug survived. Knowing that it can regenerate is one thing, but watching it do so in real time on a slide is another.

This regenerative ability, their shape, color, size, and the fact that they are single-celled organisms all seem to make us think that humans and trumpet bugs must not have a lot in common.

If we only rely on what we see, we might still think so, but as humans continue to develop new genetic research tools, we are finding that humans and trumpet beetles actually have something in common.

When we talk about genetics, we often think of DNA as a universal code, which is the simple content we are taught in biology class. The three base sequences on DNA encode an amino acid, and the amino acid is continuously transported to the protein until a stop codon is encountered, and the protein synthesis is completed. The teacher told us that the code that determines the amino acid synthesis protein is the same in all organisms.

This is not the case. We think there is a standard sequence code, that is, humans and all multicellular organisms share the same code. However, in some organisms, the code has changed and replaced, and the coding changes mostly occur in bacteria or mitochondria. Especially in eukaryotic organisms, ciliates are famous genetic freaks because they tend to truncate sequences that mark the end of genes in humans, but in the former, they guide more amino acids to stack and arrange to synthesize proteins.

Different ciliate lineages evolved different versions of this change, but it is thought that only a few ciliates follow the standard genetic code in humans, and the trumpet worm is one of them.

Scientists used the latest genetic technology to probe the blue trumpet bug sequence and confirmed this strange consistency. Usually, when people mention this level of microbial genetic research, they question the details of classification. However, in the case of trumpet bugs, they raised a deeper question: Why are they similar to humans in this way? Why are most other ciliates not like this?

If the blue trumpet bug follows a standard genetic code, does that mean that the primitive ciliates did too? And if so, does that mean that the nonstandard genetic code exhibited by so many ciliates today is not an inherent property of the phylum, but rather the result of the continued divergence and evolution of trumpet bug families long ago?

Evolution is weird and messy, a knot that sometimes seems to get tighter as it unravels, and trumpet worms prove one thing: no matter how simple something may seem, from the incredibly complex structure of their single-cell bodies to the seemingly ubiquitous genetic code in their bodies, you only need to ask "what," "why," and "how" to find yourself entangled in a series of questions, not unlike the beautiful mysteries first revealed by the first generation of "microbe hunters" hundreds of years ago.

Their discoveries changed the world, and so did ours. We live in an age full of knowledge and new discoveries, which also helps us realize that there are still many unsolved mysteries waiting for us to uncover.

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