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Genes against gravity

27.03.2015

The device of living organisms depends on where they live, and a huge number of very different factors determine the structure of the body, and physiology, and behavior - even in bacteria, even in people. Among these factors, the most universal ones can be distinguished, which are easy to enumerate: for example, the temperature of the environment, or humidity, or the concentration of oxygen in air or water. But there is something that is rarely mentioned. We are talking about the force of gravity, which acts on everyone and always. Could she play a role in shaping the appearance of living beings?

Biologists have been asking this question for quite a long time: for example, 100 years ago, D'Arcy Thompson suggested that in animals the shape of the body is largely determined by the force of gravity, and if it were twice as large on Earth, primates would not have developed any upright posture, and in general all tetrapods would be short-legged and move like lizards. Apparently, evolution had to somehow respond to the gravitational factor, but what kind of molecular-cellular mechanisms helped us adapt to gravity, we can only now find out.

Makoto Furutani-Seiki (Makoto Furutani-Seiki), together with his colleagues from the University of Bath and with the participation of researchers from Japan, Austria and the United States, were able to find a gene that is responsible for the formation of a "three-dimensional" body in animals. When it was turned off in fish, the development of tissues was disturbed, they were located incorrectly relative to each other, and the whole body was strongly flattened in the direction of the gravitational force. If it did not work in cultured human cells, they ceased to combine into volumetric clusters. In an article in Nature, the authors write that this gene, called YAP, serves as a regulator of the molecular machine that controls the mechanical forces in and between cells - the correct distribution of such forces is necessary to create most organs and body parts. Roughly speaking, thanks to YAP, we can resist gravity and generally have a more or less voluminous, rather than flat, body.

How exactly the anti-gravity gene works, how and when it turns on, and what other genes are under its control, we have yet to find out. Further experimentation here will not only reveal why we have come to look the way we do now, but will also help develop reliable methods for creating artificial organs. By controlling the genetic system responsible for the "bulkness" of an organ, we can, for example, grow a liver or kidney of the right size in the laboratory, which will not differ from the real ones - in order to transplant them later to replace the spoiled ones.

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