Biology always offers up the weird and wonderful. This week I want to share with you how we can make use of model organisms to help learn more about human functions with a view to healing after disease.

Us humans have amazing eyes but once damaged they cannot regrow. But human eyes share many other features (both from anatomy and genetics) with a freshwater apple snail, making the snail an ideal model organism we can use to understand the mechanisms of action in human eyes. The reason these snails are so special is that they can regrow their entire eyes after damage. Can we study these model organisms with a view to developing treatments for humans with eye damage? Yes we can!

Ideal characteristics of model organisms also include a fast generation time, production of large numbers of offspring and being easy to breed with simple requirements for maintaining them. All vertebrates have camera-like eyes that produce a sharp image with a high resolution. So, this is a great find, for an invertebrate to also have this design.

Researching how a new eye grows in the apple snail helps us to understand the processes of cell division, differentiation into specialised cells and the gene expression events that cause these processes to happen.

With new gene editing tools like CRISPR, the research team could mutate specific genes to see what happens to the eye development and learn the role each gene plays – the genotype-phenotype relationship is covered in all A-Level specifications. I look forward to hearing about how their research progresses.

Download the article from the SciTechDaily page here