The only thing most of us know about the California Market Squid are the plates of calamari we get at restaurants. But adult squids are about a foot long, and live in our oceans from the tip of Baja California to southeastern Alaska.
One scientist at UC San Diego wanted to study how they were able to survive in tropical regions and near-arctic regions with waters just above freezing. They found squids do this by constantly editing their genes to allow them to adapt.
“I think this process is like allowing these animals to have a pool of diverse proteins that they can use in different contexts,” said Kavita Rangan, a molecular biologist.
Rangan is a postdoctoral student who co-wrote a paper about gene editing in squids for the journal Cell. You could say she didn’t have to go far to find and analyze samples.
“One of the places where they spawn is off the coast of San Diego, and so you can find these egg casings that they lay and they’re like these long jelly fingers, and inside of each one are hundreds of developing embryos,” Rangan said.
Her research team studied those squid hatchlings — found by divers along Scripps pier in La Jolla. They investigated how a squid's RNA was recoded to allow the animals to survive in their many different environments.
“Individuals will experience very dramatic temperature changes,” she said. “So, not only do they migrate along the coast, they also do these depth migrations.”
Diving as low as 1,000 meters and surviving in water temperatures that are just above freezing.
Rangan said the squid can do that because they create proteins that can turn them into different creatures at a cellular level. They learned this when they brought their hatchlings into the lab.
“I took these animals as they hatched out and put them in tanks of different temperatures,” she said. “And just kept them in there for one day. Then took the animals and extracted their RNA and looked to see how their editing changed.”
They saw so-called motor proteins moving along a track, bearing a cargo of genetic information that allowed the cells to adapt to changing temperatures. In the lab, researchers recreated those naturally occurring tracks on microscope slides and recorded the movement with a powerful camera.
Rangan said this could mean the possibility of engineering our own proteins in order to change disease outcomes.
“It’s almost nature’s way of showing us, like, these animals are kind of doing something funky with this molecule over here. Maybe we should take a look and see how that changes the function of our proteins,” she said.
Because when it comes to the use and the function of some proteins, there isn’t a lot of difference between people and a squid.
