/ Source : Live Science

The sea anemone is an oddball: half-found and half-animal, at least when it comes to its genetic code, new research suggests.

The sea beast's genes await more like those of animals, but the regulatory lawmaking that determines whether those genes are expressed resembles that in plants, according to a study published Tuesday (March 18) in the journal Genome Research.

Image: Sea anemone
The ocean anemone is a genetic oddball, with some traits similar to plants and others more closely resembling college animals. Copyright Nature, 2005

What's more, the complicated network of gene interactions constitute in the simple sea anemone resembles that found in widely divergent, more complex animals.

"Since the body of water anemone shows a complex mural of gene regulatory elements like to the fruit fly or other model animals, we believe that this principle of complex gene regulation was already nowadays in the common antecedent of human, fly and sea anemone some 600 million years ago," Michaela Schwaiger, a researcher at the University of Vienna, said in a argument. [See Stunning Photos of Glowing Sea Creatures]

A unproblematic plan

The size of an organism'southward genome doesn't correspond to how uncomplicated or circuitous that creature's body is, so some scientists hypothesized that more than complicated links and networks between genes made for more sophisticated body plans.

Schwaiger and her colleagues at the University of Vienna analyzed the genome of the sea anemone, not merely identifying genes that code for proteins, but besides assessing snippets of code known equally promoters and enhancers, which help turn the book upwardly or downwards on gene expression.

The squad found the sea anemone'due south uncomplicated anatomy hides a complicated network of gene interactions, similar to those plant in higher animals such as fruit flies and humans. That belies the notion that more than circuitous gene networks always correlate with more than elaborate body plans, and likewise suggests the evolution of this level of cistron regulation happened before body of water anemones, fruit flies and humans diverged, about 600 meg years ago.

—Tia Ghose. Alive Science

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Scientific discipline on Twitter, Facebook & Google+. This is a condensed version of a written report from LiveScience. Read the full written report.

  • Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures
  • Unraveling the Homo Genome: half dozen Molecular Milestones
  • Gallery of Glowing Sea Creatures

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This cloth may non exist published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.