Humans and cephalopods, including octopuses and squids, have a common primitive ancestor: a worm-like animal with simple eyespots and minimal intelligence.
Later, the animal kingdom would be divided into vertebrate and invertebrate animals. And while vertebrates develop important cognitive abilities and invertebrates don’t, the exception to this rule were cephalopods.
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These mollusks have a very complex organism. Octopuses have a central brain and an independent peripheral nervous system. For example, if an octopus loses a tentacle, it can move and is still sensitive to touch.
This special complexity of mollusks has long troubled scientists, so researchers from the Max Delbrück Center and Dartmouth College in the United States studied and published a possible explanation for their evolution in the journal Science Advances.
The main approach is that these animals have a large repertoire of the microRNA (miRNA) gene group in their neuronal tissue, a development similar to that of vertebrates, so miRNA would have been key in the development of their complex brains.
Previous research, published in 2019, suggested that cephalopods do a lot of RNA editing, so using enzymes would recode their RNA. “This made me think that octopuses may not only be good at editing, but they might also have other RNA tricks up their sleeves,” Nikolaus Rajewsky, scientific director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Berlin University, told Phys.org. Max Delbruck Center.
Rajewsky led the research published in Science Advances in conjunction with the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, which sent him samples of 18 types of tissue from dead octopuses. And I found a large expansion of microRNA in the neural tissue.
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