Historically, however, it was another feature of the squid that made them famous among neuroscientists. A few hours later, I see what Rosenthal means as Pablo Miranda Fernandez, a neuroscientist from the National Institutes of Health, takes one of the squid from the Skipjack up to his dissection room and without ceremony lops off its head. Tying off the ends of the axon, Fernandez plops it in a dish of calcium-free water, so as not to disrupt the ions inside, which enable the nerve to fire.
Hundreds of times larger than the largest axon in humans, its girth allows electrical impulses to travel rapidly into the mantle , so the squid can quickly jet away from danger.
Following the discovery of these giant fibers in scientists initially thought they were blood vessels , researchers began using them for experiments on the chemical and electrical mechanisms of the nervous system and the brain.
The squid axon was so big that scientists could attach electrodes to it and zap it, measuring changes in voltage. They could squeeze out the axoplasmic goo inside and study what it was made of. The study of squid nerves has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers and two Nobel Prizes. The first was awarded in for revealing how nerves transmit electrical impulses to communicate with other cells via a chain of biochemical reactions.
This process, called an action potential, is a fundamental mechanism in all organisms with a nervous system. The second squid-inspired Nobel was awarded in for elucidating the role of neurotransmitters, such as adrenaline, in nerve signaling. A better understanding of how RNA editing works in the squid could even lead to therapies for people. But to investigate these and other mysteries of cephalopods, scientists need to be able to do genetic research on them.
For decades, this has been possible in mice and other classic model organisms, such as fruit flies and nematode worms, enabling innumerable advances in biology and medicine.
Where the human genome consists of about 3. Sequencing those letters, Albertin says, is like piecing together an enormous jigsaw puzzle that depicts an empty blue sky. After an expensive effort to sequence those billions of fragments of squid DNA and fit them together, biology threw the team another curve ball. After much trial and error, enabled by the steady supply of squid eggs from the Atlantic catch, Crawford found a way to use micro-scissors to make a slit in the chorion big enough for the needle to pass through, yet small enough to reseal behind the needle and leave the egg intact.
For the first knockout, the team chose a gene responsible for pigmentation in the squid. They selected the pigmentation gene because it would be easy to see whether the edit had worked.
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