This Fish Can Clone Itself Without Any Weird Clone Defects
· Vice
“Amazon molly” sounds like the name of a raucous barfly who gets into a lot of drunken wild west-style melees. It’s also the name of a small freshwater fish that looks just like any other fish but possesses an ability that sounds like something straight out of science fiction.
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It can clone itself, no male DNA required. Though sex is still part of the recipe.
In theory, asexual reproduction should be disastrous for the health of the species long-term since it limits genetic diversity. The more genetically diverse a creature is, the stronger and more adaptable it is. Without mixing genes between parents who themselves had their genes mixed with generations of parents before them, harmful mutations pile up, causing a series of defects that can kill off a species over the course of thousands of years.
But not the Amazon molly.
The Amazon Molly Is A Fish That Can Clone Itself Without Any Of Cloning’s Defects
According to a National Geographic report based on a new study published in the journal Nature, these fish have solved the evolutionary problem scientists assumed would wipe them out.
The species originated roughly 100,000 years ago after a hybrid pairing between two other fish: the Atlantic molly and the Sailfin molly. The result was a lineage capable of a reproductive magic trick called gynogenesis. Female Amazon mollies still mate with males from related species, but the male DNA doesn’t end up in the offspring. The interaction triggers the development of embryos that are genetic copies of the mother.
In other words, Amazon mollies technically have sex, but they don’t need the sperm most other species on earth require to create a baby. Sex to them is just hitting a start button on a process they can complete just fine on their own.
Researchers sequence the genomes of several Amazon mollies and found that the fish accumulate harmful mutations just like any other organism, but through a process called gene conversion, instead of mixing genes from two parents, they copied DNA segments from one chromosome to repair or replace damaged sequences on another. This creates genetic variation and helps eliminate harmful mutations, essentially performing a form of genetic maintenance similar to that which occurs during sexual reproduction.
Scientists have known for a while that the species was asexual, but could only assume that they had developed some kind of workaround to avoid a full-on genetic collapse. Now, researchers are theorizing that the Amazon molly might be the first clear example of how a workaround like that actually works.
Understanding the mechanics of this process could one day help us better understand, for instance, crop genetics or diseases like cancer, where rapidly multiplying cells accumulate mutations in ways that kind of look like cloning.
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