One shark can live to be 400 years old – its opened genome can tell you how on earth

Geneticists have mapped the genome of the Greenland shark. The unlocked genome may offer clues as to why the shark lives so long.

Geneticists identified a network of 81 genes inherited from the Greenland shark, or ice shark. It is known that the genes of the network repair damage to the DNA strand.

Greenland sharks can’t say beautiful. For example, it often has worm-like parasites in its eyes.

However, the species has one very interesting internal feature. It can live up to about 400 years.

The Greenland shark is thus the world’s longest-lived vertebrate. This became clear to researchers in the 2010s.

The mapping was done by European and American geneticists together. Perimä offers scientists a map to find out what makes this fish an animal that lives for a very long time.

To study longevity, we need information about the inheritance of a long-lived species, says the geneticist Steve Hoffmann newspaper The New York Timesissa. Preliminary results have been published pre-publication service at biorxiv.

Hoffman is a computational biologist at the aging institute in Leipzig and also works at the Friedrich Schiller University in the city of Jena. The research was conducted from there.

Greenland shark the inheritance is very large. It has about 6.5 billion base pairs, i.e. the building blocks of the genome.

The reading is more than twice as large as in the human DNA strip. The hermitage is the largest of the sharks’ hermitages read through.

More than two-thirds of a shark’s genome consists of repetitive genes. They are also known as so-called jumping genes.

These genes are copied on different sides of the genome. In their jumps, genes use a method that geneticists describe as “copy and paste”.

In this case, they interfere with other genes. They cause mutations and duplications in the genetic code. Jumping genes can lead to diseases in an organism.

“Those genes are like parasites, parasites of the genome,” Hoffman compares in The New York Times.

Discovery surprised researchers.

How can sharks live so long if they carry a lot of harmful genes?

One explanation is that the repair genes of the Greenland shark have been able to hijack the machinery that the genes use to jump.

It allows the genome to amplify genes involved in DNA repair. It would help the heredity to fight the damage caused by the jumping genes.

One an important discovery was to identify a network of 81 genes that has so far only been found in Greenland sharks.

There is one well-known gene in the network, TP53. It is involved in DNA repair. It also suppresses tumors.

Scientists believe that the gene explains the shark’s strong resistance to cancer.

However, the structure of the TP53 gene had changed in the Greenland shark. Now the team is evaluating whether this change will also extend the shark’s life.

Perhaps scientists should understand what the different types of living cells in a shark are like. Therefore, Greenland shark cell cultures would be needed.

Greenland shark cells could be transformed into stem cells, which can be transformed into all cell types in an organism. In this way, cultured shark heart or brain cells could be studied, for example.

Hain long life was revealed in 2016. Then the science magazine Science published a study that estimated the ages of 28 different Greenland sharks.

The age of the fish was revealed by radiocarbon dating of the eye lenses.

The researchers concluded that the oldest sharks can live up to 400 years. The Greenland shark reaches sexual maturity at around 150 years of age.

The information about the ferocious age led to Greenland sharks being studied from all sides.

Some study its heart, others its metabolism. The shark’s behavior and habitat have also been investigated.

Five during the year, three groups of geneticists competed to see who would be the first to read the entire genome of a shark.

Hoffmann’s group’s work now covers approximately 92 percent of its entire legacy.

The mapping required several trips to Greenland. The team took tissue samples from the spinal cords of dead sharks.

They were kept very cold and sent to Leipzig. There, the DNA of the samples was extracted and read through, i.e. sequenced. Finally, the result was compared with the results of other sharks.

Finally, Hoffman’s team read through the entire DNA sample of one Greenland shark, which was taken from the shark’s brain tissue.