A
rotifer is a tiny aquatic animal that has a wheel-like structure on its head called a corona, which helps it move and collect its food. It is also known for its ability to survive in different environments and has a unique reproductive process.
Full definition
Only strange, asexual animals called
bdelloid rotifers were known to grab significant amounts of DNA from other life.
You can carry live copepods to feed picky marine species (mandarin dragonets, for example) and live cultures
of rotifers for customers who want to try their luck at breeding clownfish or dottybacks.
Sandia National Laboratories biochemist Carolyn Fisher examines a beaker full of microscopic algae eaters
called rotifers being grown for the DISCOVR project.
But the book does not show us a mystic in the making, or suggest that the girl bent over her microscope was looking beyond the hydra and
rotifers into mystery.
Ironically, nanochloropsis is an industrial algae strain typically grown for feeding
rotifers on fish farms.
Scientists have been taking a cue from the
little rotifers and cloning mammals for nearly 20 years, beginning in 1996 with Dolly the sheep, created by Ian Wilmut's team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh.
To test this idea, researchers
collected rotifers from the wild and split them into separate cell cultures of approximately 10,000 animals per population.
Feast or famine In a homogeneous lab environment this species of
rotifer tends to go asexual.
When they reproduce sexually, this breed of
rotifers produces so - called resting eggs, which can survive in a harsher environment than eggs generated asexually.
Molecular Characterization of Mn - superoxide Dismutase and Gene Expression Studies in Dietary Restricted Brachionus plicatilis Rotifers
The microscopic aquatic creatures known as
bdelloid rotifers are used to enduring dry spells — in more senses than one.
A team of researchers found that they could make one breed
of rotifers (Brachionus calyciflorus)-- microscopic or near - microscopic «pseudocoelomate» animals that can reproduce both sexually and asexually — more prone to sexual reproduction just by culturing the organisms in environments with different levels of food quality.
Some rotifers seemed to have developed an alternate strategy for evading parasites: Instead of evolving alongside them, forever developing new countermeasures, they beat them in a test of endurance.
To keep them around,
the rotifers stitch these genes onto the ends of their genomes and pass them along to their genetically identical offspring.
The ones that help
the rotifer survive are kept around in the population — some perform useful functions, like breaking certain chemical bonds — while those that don't help die off.
Bdelloid
rotifers have survived 80 million years with no sex at all; no male of the species has ever been observed.
The rotifers act like genetic vacuums, scooping up genes around with abandon and putting them to use in their own bodies.
When the environment becomes more favorable, they rehydrate and spring alive again (sometimes months or years later), freed from infectious agents that don't have
the rotifer's toughness.
Rotifers are able to survive extremely hostile environments by slipping into a dehydrated dormant state.
As more phosphorus becomes available, microscopic organisms, such as nematodes, tardigrades,
rotifers, algae and cyanobacteria, may become more abundant in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
We could get radiation - resistance genes, for example, from the Bdelloid
rotifer, a class of small invertebrates that live in freshwater pools and survive megadoses of ionizing radiation.
Perhaps the most threatening member of the predatory panel is
a rotifer, a microscopic organism capable of eating 200 algal cells per minute.
They used two different groups of resident species consisting of aquatic bacteria, ciliates — protozoans with hair - like projections called cilia — and
rotifers, organisms with cilia - laced mouths and retractable feet.
The ciliates and
rotifers were collected from Bamboo Pond in Rutgers Gardens in New Brunswick.
One group had five ciliates and
a rotifer.
A few eukaryotes, notably the Bdelloid
rotifers, have lost the ability to carry out meiosis and have acquired the ability to reproduce by parthenogenesis.
Except for houseflies, animal species tested with CR so far, including primates, rats, mice, spiders, Drosophila, C. elegans and
rotifers, have shown lifespan extension.
Some female lizards can reproduce without sperm penetrating the egg, and the bdelloid
rotifer, a microscopic moss dweller, has been asexual for 85 million years.
Like the New Mexico whiptail, bdelloid
rotifers are all female and reproduce entirely by parthenogenesis.
Despite tens of millions of years of celibacy,
these rotifers are an amazingly diverse group with more than 300 species.
Members of another «immortal» species, the tiny invertebrate Bdelloid
rotifers, are all female and reproduce by spawning identical clone daughters.
Otto, who works with yeast, was excited to see that
these rotifers look to be a promising new model system that other researchers can now examine at the molecular level to study what prompts — and what is selected for in — sexual reproduction.
The B. calyciflorus are also closely related to another group of
rotifers that only produce asexually, providing scientists with a useful comparison to study slight differences that might allow for sex, Otto notes.
The implications of the work will likely bear fruit far beyond
the rotifer world.
«There are other theories that we can test with
these rotifers,» Becks notes, hinting that there may be more sex studies in the works.
The rotifers that had been transferred between the two food - quality environments, however, were reproducing sexually at more than double the rate (some 15 percent).
Despite reproducing by parthenogensis, bdelloid
rotifers have found a way to evolve into various distinct species.
After 15 weeks (with about one new generation per day), the researchers found that
rotifers in the homogeneous environments were better adapted to their respective food environments (than they were to the alternative environment), and about seven percent of these rotifers» eggs were created via sexual reproduction.
But despite the overall odds of optimal gene combinations winning out over time, for an individual
rotifer — or generation of rotifers — the chances of a successful individual coming out ahead genetically are scant.
In that scenario, Otto explains,
some rotifers would go, «Holy smokes, we're not very fit in this environment.
Rotifers are not vertebrates.
The most complicated fungal cell known to science belongs to a parasite called Haptoglossa mirabilis first lured into
a rotifer - baited trap in the soil of a tropical greenhouse in a Toronto suburb on October 7, 1979.
The molecular mechanisms of life history alterations in
a rotifer: a novel approach in population dynamics.
This amino acid has also been found to extend the lifespan of
rotifers, fruit flies, and mice8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
Introduction to the Rotifera
Rotifers: the wheel animalcules Rotifers are microscopic aquatic animals of the phylum Rotifera.
Rotifers can be found in Dating is a stage of romantic relationships in humans whereby two people meet socially with the aim of each assessing the other's suitability as a
He writes with a sense of awe about everything from tiny creatures such as the bdelloid
rotifers (a large one is 2 mm long)- a species that «hasn't had sex for several million years» and yet survives — to the mammals we're familiar with such as lions, elephants and whales.