China plans to issue biosafety certificates to domestic GM soybean, corn

BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s agriculture ministry said on Monday it plans to issue biosafety certificates to a domestically grown, genetically modified (GM) soybean crop and two corn crops, in a move toward commercializing GM grain production in the world’s top market.



FILE PHOTO: An employee picks out bad beans from a pile of soybeans at a supermarket in Wuhan, Hubei province April 14, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo


China will grant the certificate to SHZD32-01 soybean developed by Shanghai Jiaotong University, provided there is no objection during a 15-day period soliciting public opinion, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement.

If approved, it will become China’s first GM soybean crop to receive such a certificate, a first step toward commercialized production.

Dabeinong’s DBN9936 corn and double-stacked 12-5 corn developed by Hangzhou Ruifeng Biotech Co Ltd and Zhejiang University were also expected to receive the certificate.

Beijing has spent billions of dollars researching GM crops, but has held back from commercial production of any food grains because of consumer concerns about their safety.

China granted biosafety certificates to its first GM corn varieties and two domestic rice varieties in 2009, but has never moved to commercialize these crops.

Some in the industry believe Beijing’s most recent move could mean that China is ready to start commercialization of some domestic GM crops.

“This signifies the policy changes from the central government as China is moving to commercialize GMO corn,” said James Chen, chief financial officer of Origin Agritech Limited

“GMO corn commercialization would benefit Chinese farmers, especially those in northeastern China,” Chen said.

Origin Agritech received biosafety certificates for its phytase GM corn trait in 2009 and has several new varieties of GM corn in the pipeline for biosafety approval, including insect resistance and glyphosate tolerance double-stacked traits.

China has said it aims to push forward the commercialization of GM corn and soybeans by 2020. Beijing has long approved imports of these products.

“If the government actually issues the certificate, it will be significant progress,” said another source with a major developer of GM crop strains in China.

“But it really depends on whether the crops can be commercialized in the end,” added the source, who declined to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

No eyes? No problem. Marine creature expands boundaries of vision


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cousin of the starfish that resides in the coral reefs of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico lacks eyes, but can still see, according to scientists who studied this creature that expands the boundaries of the sense of sight in the animal kingdom.

Researchers said on Thursday that the red brittle star, called Ophiocoma wendtii, is only the second creature known to be able to see without having eyes - known as extraocular vision - joining a single species of sea urchin.

It possesses this exotic capability thanks to light-sensing cells, called photoreceptors, covering its body and pigment cells, called chromatophores, that move during the day to facilitate the animal’s dramatic color change from a deep reddish-brown in daytime to a stripy beige at nighttime.



A red brittle star, Ophiocoma wendtii, is seen in this image released on January 2, 2020. Lauren Sumner-Rooney/Handout via REUTERS. A cousin of the sea star and sea cucumber, this species that lives among the coral reefs of the Caribbean is one of two known animals that lack eyes but still possess the ability to see.

Brittle stars, with five radiating arms extending from a central disk, are related to starfish (also called sea stars), sea cucumbers, sea urchins and others in a group of marine invertebrates called echinoderms. They have a nervous system but no brain.

The red brittle star - up to about 14 inches (35 cm) from arm tip to arm tip - lives in bright and complex habitats, with high predation threats from reef fish. It stays hidden during daytime - making the ability to spot a safe place to hide critical - and comes out at night to feed on detritus.

Its photoreceptors are surrounded during daytime by chromatophores that narrow the field of the light being detected, making each photoreceptor like the pixel of a computer image that, when combined with other pixels, makes a whole image. The visual system does not work at night, when the chromatophores contract.

“If our conclusions about the chromatophores are correct, this is a beautiful example of innovation in evolution,” said Lauren Sumner-Rooney, a research fellow at Oxford University Museum of Natural History who led the study published in the journal Current Biology.

Laboratory experiments indicated the brittle stars have rudimentary vision. Placed in a circular arena, they moved toward walls that were white with a black bar, suggestive of a daytime hiding place.

Another scenario showed they were not simply detecting brightness versus darkness. When they were presented with gray walls making it so no part of the arena was lighter or darker overall, they still moved toward the black stripe, which was centered on a white stripe so as to reflect the same amount of light as the gray.

“It’s such an alien concept for us, as very visually driven animals, to conceive of how an animal might see its habitat without eyes, but now we know of two examples,” Sumner-Rooney added.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Oldest stuff on Earth found inside meteorite that hit Australia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A meteorite that crashed into rural southeastern Australia in a fireball in 1969 contained the oldest material ever found on Earth, stardust that predated the formation of our solar system by billions of years, scientists said on Monday.

A scanning electron micrograph of a presolar silicon carbide grain, about 8 micrometers in its longest dimension, from a meteorite that crashed into Australia in 1969 is seen in this image released in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. January 13, 2020. Janaina N. Avila/Handout via REUTERS
The oldest of 40 tiny dust grains trapped inside the meteorite fragments retrieved around the town of Murchison in Victoria state dated from about 7 billion years ago, about 2.5 billion years before the sun, Earth and rest of our solar system formed, the researchers said.

In fact, all of the dust specks analyzed in the research came from before the solar system’s formation - thus known as “presolar grains” - with 60% of them between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years old and the oldest 10% dating to more than 5.6 billion years ago.

The stardust represented time capsules dating to before the solar system. The age distribution of the dust - many of the grains were concentrated at particular time intervals - provided clues about the rate of star formation in the Milky Way galaxy, the researchers said, hinting at bursts of stellar births rather than a constant rate.

“I find this extremely exciting,” said Philipp Heck, an associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago who led the research published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Despite having worked on the Murchison meteorite and presolar grains for almost 20 years, I still am fascinated that we can study the history of our galaxy with a rock,” Heck added.

The grains are small, measuring from 2 to 30 micrometers in size. A micrometer is a one-thousandth of a millimeter or about 0.000039 of an inch.

Stardust forms in the material ejected from stars and carried by stellar winds, getting blown into interstellar space. During the solar system’s birth, this dust was incorporated into everything that formed including the planets and the sun but survived intact until now only in asteroids and comets.

The researchers detected the tiny grains inside the meteorite by crushing fragments of the rock and then segregating the component parts in a paste they described as smelling like rotten peanut butter.

Scientists have developed a method to determine stardust’s age. Dust grains floating through space get bombarded by high-energy particles called cosmic rays. These rays break down atoms in the grain into fragments, such as carbon into helium.

These fragments accumulate over time and their production rate is rather constant. The longer the exposure time to cosmic rays, the more fragments accumulate. The researchers counted these fragments in the laboratory, enabling them to calculate the stardust’s age.

Scientists previously had found a presolar grain in the Murchison meteorite that was about 5.5 billion years old, until now the oldest-known solid material on Earth. The oldest-known minerals that formed on Earth are found in rock from Australia’s Jack Hills that formed 4.4 billion years ago, 100 million years after the planet formed.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Brain freeze: Russian firm offers path to immortality for a fee

Dmitriy Turlyun

SERGIYEV POSAD, Russia (Reuters) - When Alexei Voronenkov’s 70-year-old mother passed away, he paid to have her brain frozen and stored in the hope breakthroughs in science will one day be able to bring her back to life.
It is one of 71 brains and human cadavers - which Russian company KrioRus calls its “patients” - floating in liquid nitrogen in one of several metres-tall vats in a corrugated metal shed outside Moscow.

They are stored at -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8°F) with the aim of protecting them against deterioration, although there is currently no evidence science will be able to revive the dead.

“I did this because we were very close and I think it is the only chance for us to meet in the future,” said Voronenkov who intends to undergo the procedure, known as cryonics, when he dies.

The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’s Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis”, in comments to the Izvestia newspaper.

It is “a fantasy speculating on people’s hopes of resurrection from the dead and dreams of eternal life”, the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Valeriya Udalova, KrioRus’s director who got her dog frozen when it died in 2008, said it is likely that humankind will develop the technology to revive dead people in the future, but that there is no guarantee of such technology.

KrioRus says hundreds of potential clients from nearly 20 countries have signed up for its after-death service.

It costs $36,000 for a whole body and $15,000 for the brain alone for Russians, who earn average monthly salaries of $760, according to official statistics. Prices are slightly higher for non-Russians.

The company says it is the only one in Russia and the surrounding region. Set up in 2005, it has at least two competitors in the United States, where the practice dates back further.

Voronenkov said he set his hopes on science. “I hope one day it reaches a level when we can produce artificial bodies and organs to create an artificial body where my mother’s brain can be integrated.”

KrioRus’ director Udalova argues that those paying to have dying relatives’ remains preserved are showing how much they love them.

“They try to bring hope,” she said. “What can we do for our dying relatives or the ones that we love? A nice burial, a photo album,” she said. “They go further, proving their love even more.”

Reporting by Dmitriy Turlyun; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Philippa Fletcher

Deep-sea microbe sheds light on primordial evolutionary milestone

Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A microorganism scooped up in deep-sea mud off Japan’s coast has helped scientists unlock the mystery of one of the watershed evolutionary events for life on Earth: the transition from the simple cells that first colonized the planet to complex cellular life - fungi, plants and animals including people.

A scanning electron microscopy image of the single-celled organism Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum strain MK-D1 showing the cell with tentacle-like branching protrusions is seen in this image released at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Yokosuka, Japan on January 15, 2020. Hiroyuki Imachi, Masaru K. Nobu and JAMSTEC/Handout via REUTERS

Researchers said on Wednesday they were able to study the biology of the microorganism, retrieved from depths of about 1.5 miles (2.5 km), after coaxing it to grow in the laboratory. They named it Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, referring to the Greek mythological figure Prometheus who created humankind from clay and stole fire from the gods.

Prometheoarchaeum’s spherical cell - with a diameter of roughly 500 nanometers, or one-20,000th of a centimeter - boasts long, often branching tentacle-like appendages on its outer surface.

It is part of a group called Archaea, relatively simple single-cell organisms lacking internal structures such as a nucleus. Scientists have long puzzled over the evolutionary shift from such simple bacteria-like cells to the first rudimentary fungi, plants and animals - a group called eukaryotes - perhaps 2 billion years ago.

Based on a painstaking laboratory study of Prometheoarchaeum and observations of its symbiotic - mutually beneficial - relationship with a companion bacterium, the researchers offered an explanation.

They proposed that appendages like those of Prometheoarchaeum entangled a passing bacterium, which was then engulfed and eventually evolved into an organelle - internal structure - called a mitochondrion that is the powerhouse of a cell and crucial for respiration and energy production.

The solar system including Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. The first life on Earth, simple marine microbes, appeared roughly 4 billion years ago. The later advent of eukaryotes set in motion evolutionary paths that led to a riotous assemblage of organisms over the eons like palm trees, blue whales, T. rex, hummingbirds, clownfish, shiitake mushrooms, lobsters, daisies, woolly mammoths and Marilyn Monroe.

“How we - as eukaryotes - originated is a fundamental question related to how we - as humans - came to be,” said microbiologist Masaru Nobu of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, one of the leaders of the study published in the journal Nature.

Prometheoarchaeum is a member of a subgroup called Asgard archaea - named for the dwelling place of the gods in Norse mythology. Other members of this subgroup were retrieved from the frigid seabed near a hydrothermal vent system called Loki’s Castle, named after a Norse mythological figure, between Greenland and Norway.

The research on Prometheoarchaeum, Nobu said, indicates that the Asgard archaea are the closest living relatives to the first eukaryotes.

The researchers used a submersible research vessel to collect mud containing Prometheoarchaeum from the Omine Ridge off Japan in 2006. They studied it in the laboratory in a years-long process and watched it slowly proliferate after incubating the samples in a vessel infused with methane gas to simulate the deep-sea marine sediment environment in which it resides.

“We were able to obtain the first complete genome of this group of archaea ---30conclusively show that these archaea possess many genes that had been thought to be only found in eukaryotes,” Nobu said.

Prometheoarchaeum was found to be reliant on its companion bacterium.

“The organism ‘eats’ amino acids through symbiosis with a partner,” Nobu said. “This is because the organism can neither fully digest amino acids by itself, gain energy if any byproducts have accumulated, nor build its own cell without external help.”

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Did asteroid that hit Australia help thaw ancient 'snowball Earth'?


Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified Earth’s oldest-known impact crater, and in doing so may have solved a mystery about how our planet emerged from one of its most dire periods.

Researchers have determined that the 45-mile-wide (70-km-wide) Yarrabubba crater in Australia formed when an asteroid struck Earth just over 2.2 billion years ago. The collision occurred at a time when the planet was believed to have been encased in ice and the impact may have driven climate warming that led to a global thaw.

“Looking at our planet from space, it would have looked very different,” said isotope geology professor Chris Kirkland of Curtin University in Australia, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature Communications. “... You would see a white ball not our familiar blue marble.”

The researchers suspect the region was covered in an ice sheet up to 3 miles (5 km) thick at the time. They calculated that the violent asteroid strike may have transformed immense amounts of ice into water vapor - sending perhaps 200 billion tons of it billowing into the atmosphere. It would have served as a greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The researchers are wondering whether this thaw helped shepherd Earth into a climate more favorable for the simple microbes that inhabited the planet at the time to thrive and evolve, possibly making it a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth.

The planet descended into one of its two primordial “snowball Earth” periods 2.4 billion years ago amid a rise in oxygen in an atmosphere formerly dominated by methane and carbon dioxide. The asteroid, estimated at 4-1/2 miles (7 km) wide, landed at Yarrabubba in the state of Western Australia, coinciding with the end of the deep freeze.

“During the time of the Yarrabubba impact, life was more simple but did contain organisms like stromatolites, algal mounds that are still in existence today,” said study lead author Timmons Erickson, a NASA research scientist at the Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

“It is curious to think of an asteroid impact shifting the Earth’s atmosphere to something more clement for life than a ‘snowball’ scenario,” Erickson added.

The researchers determined the crater’s age by examining tiny crystals of the minerals monazite and zircon formed in the asteroid impact.

Earth has been hit by space rocks many times since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. For example, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the inexorable movement of Earth’s tectonic plates and surface erosion have erased most of the oldest craters. Until now, the oldest-known impact crater was one in South Africa with a diameter of more than 120 miles (200 km) that formed just over 2 billion years old.

The other “snowball Earth” period lasted from 700 million to 600 million years ago.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Chilean scientists scramble to save last of desert frogs from extinction

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https://www.reuters.com/video/?videoId=OVBY8FOFB&jwsource=cl

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - When Chilean scientists last year discovered 14 Loa water frogs struggling to survive in a nearly dry river bed in the country’s northern desert, the clock began ticking.

They believed these to be among the last of the species.

The tiny, dark-spotted amphibians, Telmatobius dankoi, had long persisted against all odds in a tiny creek in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s driest. But pollution and habitat destruction outside Calama, a fast-growing mining city of 180,000, has pushed the frogs to the brink, scientists say.

The frog’s tragic predicament has now unleashed a new effort in Chile to save them.

Scientists rushed the ailing frogs by plane to Santiago, where late last year they sought to recreate their habitat in Santiago’s Metropolitan Zoo.

“Our principal aim was to save them from extinction,” said Felipe Sotomayor, the zoo’s deputy director.

Zoo researchers were forced to start from scratch, first adding minerals to distilled water until they achieved a chemical composition similar to that of the Loa frog’s native habitat.

“There wasn’t a lot of research around how this animal lived in the wild and so we had to extrapolate much of the information from its relatives,” Sotomayor said.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the frog to be “critically endangered,” but acknowledges more research is needed to understand their habitat and save them from extinction.

The frog’s range is restricted to just 10 sq. km (3.9 sq. mi), a tiny oasis of water and reeds amid a sprawling Chilean desert of parched sand and rock.

“The first stage was to save the lives of these animals,” said Osvaldo Cabeza, the zoo’s herpetology supervisor.

Thirteen of the frogs survived in their newly created home in Santiago. One perished.

Now, Cabeza says the scientist’s focus has shifted to encouraging the survivor’s to feed and reproduce in captivity, the frog’s last chance for survival.

“We’re lucky to have these frogs so that we can send out a warning cry for conservation,” Sotomayor says. “Clearly we’re doing something wrong and we don’t have much room for error.”

Reporting by Santiago Bureau and Reuters TV, writing by Dave Sherwood, Editing by Franklin Paul

Singapore's Shiok Meats hopes to hook diners with lab-grown shrimp

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Shiok Meats, a Singapore-based start-up whose name means very good in local slang, aims to become the first company in the world to bring shrimp grown in a laboratory to diners’ plates.

Demand for meat substitutes is booming, as consumer concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment grow. Plant-based meat alternatives, popularized by Beyond Meat Inc and Impossible Foods, increasingly feature on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.

But so-called clean meat, which is genuine meat grown from cells outside the animal, is still at a nascent stage.

More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029.

Shiok grows minced meat by extracting a sample of cells from shrimp. The cells are fed with nutrients in a solution and kept at a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), which helps them multiply.

The stem cells become meat in four to six weeks.

One kg (2.2 lb) of lab-grown shrimp meat now costs $5,000, says Chief Executive Sandhya Sriram. That means a single ‘siu mai’ (pork and shrimp) dumpling typically eaten in a dim sum meal would cost as much as $300, using Shiok’s shrimp.

Sriram, a vegetarian, hopes to cut the cost to $50 per kg by the end of this year by signing a new low-cost deal for nutrients to grow the meat cells and expects it will fall further as the company achieves scale.

Shiok is backed by Henry Soesan

to, chief executive of Philippines’ Monde Nissin Corp, which owns British meat substitute firm Quorn. It wants to raise $5 million to fund a pilot plant in Singapore to sell to restaurants and food suppliers.

“We are looking at next year, so we might be the first ever company to launch a cell-based meat product in the world,” Sriram said. Shiok still needs approval from the city-state’s food regulator.

Slideshow (8 Images)

Cell-based meat companies also face the challenge of consumer perception of their product.

Any alternative means of making animal protein without harming the environment are positive, but more studies are needed to understand any negative consequences of producing cellular protein, said Paul Teng, a specialist in agritechnology innovations at Nanyang Technological University.

In Singapore, some consumers said they would give lab-grown meat a shot.

“I am willing to try,” said 60-year-old Pet Loh, while she shopped for shrimp in a Singapore market. “I may not exactly dare to eat it frequently, but I don’t mind buying and trying it because the animals in the oceans are declining.”

Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan and Travis Teo in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger

UPDATED

'Karoo firewalkers': Dinosaurs braved South Africa's land of lava
An undated image of Afrodelatorrichnus ellenbergeri, a set of hand-feet impressions of a quadrupedal dinosaur, are seen preserved in a sandstone layer in South Africa alongside an interpretive outline of the tracks, in a combination of photos released January 29, 2020. Bordy et al. 2020 PLoS One/Handout via REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About 183 million years ago during the early part of the Jurassic Period, enormous amounts of lava flowed across the landscape in what is now South Africa, transforming the environment into a land of fire.

But fossil footprints described by scientists on Wednesday showed that intrepid dinosaurs and other animals managed to inhabit this region - now the semiarid Karoo region of South Africa - during quieter periods between the volcanic eruptions.

These “Karoo firewalkers,” as University of Cape Town geologist Emese Bordy called them, were some of the last animals known to have lived in this inhospitable region before it ultimately was engulfed by molten rock.

The researchers found a sandstone layer on a farm in the center of South Africa with five fossils trackways that were left by at least three different animals that walked across the moist sandy banks of a stream. One was a relatively small two-legged meat-eating dinosaur, another was a similarly small four-legged apparently plant-eating dinosaur and the third may have been a primitive mammal.

“For short time periods, the streams were flowing again, the sun was shining, the plants were growing and the animals, among them dinosaurs, were grazing and hunting,” said Bordy, who led the research published in the journal PLOS ONE. “This is attested by the vertebrate footprints of both meat- and plant-eating dinosaurs, plant remains, sediment deposits of streams and lakes, to name just a few.”

“The properties of the sandstone allow us to tell that the tracks were deposited in seasonal streams that run during flash flood events,” added Bordy, whose team also included postgraduate students Akhil Rampersadh, Miengah Abrahams and Howard Head. “Hot was hot back then, too. So no, they did not walk on the lava.”

During this time, there were major extinctions of species, especially in the oceans, caused mostly by gases emitted from immense lava flows that poured onto the land surface in South Africa. Even as it incinerated the landscape, the lava flows changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and seas.

Fossil footprints, in the absence of skeletal fossils, sometimes offer the only evidence that animals were present in an ancient environment. The sandstone containing the tracks was sandwiched in between layers of volcanic rock, revealing a picture of a functioning ecosystem that survived despite threats of devastation from further eruptions.


“This story helps us change the way we see life in stressful and hostile environments, and thus improves our understanding of the history of life on Earth,” Bordy said.

The 'Firewalkers' Of Karoo: Dinosaurs And Other Animals Left Tracks In A 'Land Of Fire'

1/29/2020 

In southern Africa, dinosaurs and synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their closest fossil relatives, survived in a "land of fire" at the start of an Early Jurassic mass extinction, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Emese M. Bordy of the University of Cape Town and colleagues.


Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the Highlands ichnosite at the 

Pliensbachian-Toarcian boundary [Credit: Bordy et al, 2020]

The Karoo Basin of southern Africa is well-known for its massive deposits of igneous rocks left behind by extensive basaltic lava flows during the Early Jurassic. At this time, intense volcanic activity is thought to have had dramatic impacts on the local environment and global atmosphere, coincident with a worldwide mass extinction recorded in the fossil record. The fossils of the Karoo Basin thus have a lot to tell about how ecosystems responded to these environmental stresses.

In this study, Bordy and colleagues describe and identify footprints preserved in a sandstone layer deposited between lava flows, dated to 183 million years ago. In total, they report five trackways containing a total of 25 footprints, representing three types of animals: 1) potentially small synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their forerunners; 2) large, bipedal, likely carnivorous dinosaurs; and 3) small, quadrupedal, likely herbivorous dinosaurs represented by a new ichnospecies (trace fossils like footprints receive their own taxonomic designations, known as ichnospecies).

These fossils represent some of the very last animals known to have inhabited the main Karoo Basin before it was overwhelmed by lava. Since the sandstone preserving these footprints was deposited between lava flows, this indicates that a variety of animals survived in the area even after volcanic activity had begun and the region was transformed into a "land of fire."

The authors suggest that further research to uncover more fossils and refine the dating of local rock layers has the potential to provide invaluable data on how local ecosystems responded to intense environmental stress at the onset of a global mass extinction.

Bordy adds: "The fossil footprints were discovered within a thick pile of ancient basaltic lava flows that are ~183 million years old. The fossil tracks tell a story from our deep past on how continental ecosystems could co-exist with truly giant volcanic events that can only be studied from the geological record, because they do not have modern equivalents, although they can occur in the future of the Earth."

Source: Public Library of Science [January 29, 2020]

Bionic jellyfish? Yes, and they are here to help

Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It may sound more like science fiction than science fact, but researchers have created bionic jellyfish by embedding microelectronics into these ubiquitous marine invertebrates with hopes to deploy them to monitor and explore the world’s oceans.

A small prosthetic enabled the jellyfish to swim three times faster and more efficiently without causing any apparent stress to the animals, which have no brain, central nervous system or pain receptors, the researchers said.

The next steps will be to test ways to control where the jellyfish go and develop tiny sensors that could perform long-term measurements of ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity, acidity, oxygen levels, nutrients and microbial communities. They even envision installing miniscule cameras.

“It’s very sci-fi futuristic,” said Stanford University bioengineer Nicole Xu, co-author of the research published this week in the journal Science Advances. “We could send these bionic jellyfish to different areas of the ocean to monitor signs of climate change or observe natural phenomena.”

An initial goal will be deep dives because measurements at great depths are a major gap in our understanding of the oceans, added California Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor John Dabiri, the study’s other co-author.

“Basically, we’d release the bionic jellyfish at the surface, have it swim down to increasing depths, and see just how far we can get it to go down into the ocean and still make it back to the surface with data,” Dabiri added.


The study involved a common type of jellyfish called moon jellyfish, with a diameter of 4-8 inches (10-20 cm).

Jellyfish propel themselves through the water by contracting their muscles to collapse their umbrella-shaped body, and then relaxing. The prosthetic - basically a chip, battery and electrodes that stimulate the muscle - causes the jellyfish to pulse their bodies more frequently, akin to how a pacemaker regulates heart rate. The prosthetic is eight-tenths of an inch (2 cm) in diameter.

Jellyfish are known to secrete mucus when stressed. No such reaction occurred during the research and the animals swam normally after the prosthetic was removed, the researchers said.

“Care is taken not to harm the jellyfish,” Dabiri said.

A jellyfish augmented with a microelectronics implant designed by researchers Nicole Xu and John Dabiri is seen in an artist's rendering released January 30, 2020. Rebecca Konte/Caltech/Handout via REUTERS.

There are many existing technologies to study the ocean near the surface including satellites and robotic sailboats called saildrones, Dabiri said.

But knowledge of the ocean declines at depths greater than about 65 feet (20 meters), where researchers must rely either on instruments deployed from ships - costly to operate - or use smaller underwater vehicles typically limited to day-long operation due to energy-storage limitations, Dabiri added.

“Jellyfish have existed for over 500 million years, and over that time, their body structure has remained largely unchanged, so it’s interesting to figure out what makes them so special and how we can learn from them,” Xu said.

“Because we use animals with natural swimming motions, the hope is that they won’t disturb the environment in the same way that a submarine might, so we can expand the types of environments we can monitor,” she added.

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Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler
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