The researchers chose to sequence the genome of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides), a hearty octopus that is big, but small enough to live in an indoor aquarium, Albertin said.
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“Octopuses and other cephalopods are indeed remarkable creatures”, said University of Chicago biology graduate student Caroline Albertin, who helped lead the research, which was published in the journal Nature.
How so? Well, after sequencing the entire 2.7 billion “letters” of the octopodes’ genetic code, they found that it has 33,000 unique genes.
Octopuses, squids, cuttlefish and nautiluses, are cephalopods – a class of predatory mollusks with an evolutionary history spanning more than 500 million years.
“The octopus nervous system is organized in a totally different way from ours: The central brain surrounds the esophagus, which is typical of invertebrates, but it also has groups of neurons in the arms that can work relatively autonomously, plus huge optic lobes involved in vision”, study co-author Daniel Rokhsar, a professor of genetics and genomics at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
After a long time and many talk with demands by using overseas gurus, a bunch of specialists made it possible to full navigating the whole human genome of one’s octopus. However, Ragsdale and his colleagues found no evidence of duplications.
The octopus’s genome is almost the size of the human genome and much larger than those of other sequenced invertebrates such as snails or oysters.
The team also used the octopus genome to track down the genes involved in adaptive coloration, which allows the octopus to change its skin color and texture in order to blend into its environment and escape predation.
Scientists have unlocked the genetic secrets of one of earth’s underwater wonders – the octopus – whose eight sucker-studded arms bestow an otherworldly appearance and large brain place it among the smartest invertebrates. While their role in octopuses is unclear, the team found elevated transposon expression in neural tissues. The suckers, for example, express a set of genes that resemble receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, but the proteins these genes code for lack the ability to bind acetylcholine and are suspected to function as chemosensory receptors for the octopus’s ability to taste with its suckers, according to the research.
The researchers identified six genes for the skin proteins known as reflections.
Cephalopod intelligence is extremely important because it relies on an entirely different nervous systems to that of mammals.
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“The octopus’s position in the Mollusca phylum illustrates evolution at its most spectacular”, pointed out neurobiologist Benny Hochner at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, who has studied octopus neurophysiology for 20 years. The octopus genome contained the 1,800 of these transcription factors, which is the second-largest gene family discovered so far in animals. The large size of the octopus genome was initially attributed to whole genome duplication events during evolution.
