Despite being brainless and consisting of mostly water, jellyfish have applications that we’ve only just begun to exploit. Between all the different species, jellyfish have incredible properties such a natural illumination, regeneration, and even possible immortality.
Jellyfish get their glow from Green Florescent Protein (GFP). Using a gene that’s involved in the production of GFP, scientists can tag proteins and then trace them through a living organism. This can be taken to the extent of tracking fertilization within fruit flies and other test insects. Recently scientists have been using this method to track insulin production in the liver, cancer call, and even HIV cell activity.
This practice can be applied to other serious viruses to help track their location and origin. This would work especially well for very infectious and hard to control viruses such as Ebola. Attaching a GFP to the Ebola virus would help doctors track it in patients that may not be showing symptoms yet and thus increasing the chances of finding and quarantining the infected population.
A species of jellyfish known as Turritopsis dohrnii is one of the many that can regenerate itself. Unlike most others, this jellyfish “ages in reverse.” It can, at any point in its life cycle, go in reverse and become a polyp again. The way it works is through cellular transdifferentiation. A process by which cells become different types of cells. Because of this, other than being eaten or killed in some other similar manner, the jellyfish is immortal. It seems to continuously just restart its cycle. With this in mind, the jellyfish is also reproducing. This could lead to possible problems in the future since the jellyfish is multiplying but not dying off. It’s already begun to spread and thrives in most, if not all, the world’s oceans.
We’ve only just begun to take advantage of all the possibilities that come from sea life. Many other sea creatures such as sharks (immune to cancer) can open the door to unthinkable medical advances.
http://www.livescience.com/16752-gfp-protein-fluorescent-nih-nigms.html
http://jvi.asm.org/content/80/11/5156.full
This post was extremely interesting to me because just moments before checking this site I was planning on writing a post about jellyfish and immortality. It’s absolutely fascinating to me that jellyfish can regenerate and restart its life cycle. With species like this jellyfish, humans will hopefully be able to look into all the different traits that make this jellyfish so special and hopefully one day be able to apply to them to humanity. It would be incredible if we could find a way to regenerate organs, muscles, tissues, or even bones. Who knows if this will ever actually happen but even just thinking about it as a possibility is a step in the right direction. Here’s another article why jellyfish are an amazing species. http://www.immortal-jellyfish.com/
That is crazy and so cool that jellyfish could have an impact on the medical world! Has this been used in humans yet? You said it was tested in fruit flies, but are they close to using it in humans or have they done so already? I wonder what other sea creatures have helped make medical advances. It seems like there could be many risks though especially since there are so many creatures in the sea and it is hard to know much about some of them. Here is a list of some other “medicines from the sea” http://www.noaa.gov/features/economic_0309/medicines.html.