Creatively - implement chemical can make the mind of one fish to develop into the wit of another . researcher reported today that they ’d converted the genius of John Rock - dwelling fish called cichlids into those of a very different , but related to , fish species .
The researchers from Georgia Tech write up in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they dose the conceptus of rock - dwelling cichlids with Li chloride . Within days , they had develop the brains of Baroness Dudevant - dwelling cichlids . These sand - dwell cousins of the fish have brains with very dissimilar characteristics , including utmost variations in the vision - process neighborhood of the brain .
concord toa button from Georgia Tech , this discovery overturns some long - held theories about brain development :
In the mid 1990s , the theory called “ late equals large ” was put forward to excuse the way wit acquire across species . The mind begins as a blank ticket . In other development , the prior , or front , part of the brain is specified from the later , or back , part . After that , neurogenesis occurs as precursor cells suppurate to become neurons . These precursor can duplicate endlessly , but once they become functional neurons , echo ends . The later the shift from precursors to fledged neurons , the larger the brain , or head region , becomes . The “ late equals large ” model holds that the brains of different species , for example humans vs. black eye , are interchangeable early in maturation and differ because of the later procedure of neurogenesis .
“ We find differences in the general patterning of the brain as too soon as 48 hours after fertilization , before neurogenesis start , ” said J. Todd Streelman , associate professor in Georgia Tech ’s School of Biology .
Streelman , Ph.D. student Jonathan Sylvester , and their colleagues studied brain development in six mintage of cichlid from Lake Malawi stock , three specie from the rock - dwelling lineage and three specie of their sand - lie in first cousin .
“ We recur our tests from two to four days after fertilization and find that sand – dwelling house cichlids exhibited a turgid verbal expression field of the gene wnt1 , know to be an authoritative constituent in the development of the posterior brain . This correlates with a larger thalamus , a posterior forebrain structure used in the processing of vision , ” said Sylvester .
The guts - dwelling cichlids habituate their visual modality to detect plankton prey , so their brains are heavily devoted to integrating optical signal . However , the careen - dwelling species feed by scraping alga from stone and possess bombastic cerebra , or telencephala , perhaps to aid in navigating their complex 3D environments .
“ The genomes of these species are very exchangeable , ” pronounce Streelman , “ almost as similar as those of any two human , and yet their brains alter as much as some mammal group , one from each other . ”
Does this mean you could treat a chimp conceptus and make its brain human ? Possibly – as long as you started very early in the process of maturation .
Full scientific paper availablevia PNAS
BiologyNeuroscienceScience
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