Immortality exists, but to achieve it, you have to be a jellyfish, not a god or a vampire. Also, only one species of cnidarian, Turritopsis dohrnii, is known to have found the secret of eternal life. Geneticists hope to compare T. dorniithe DNA with its close relative, T. rubrait will help us understand the aging process and how to avoid it.
Turritopsis they are warm water jellyfish half a centimeter (0.2 inch) long. At least three species of hydra have the ability to age backwards like Benjamin Button, from adult to juvenile, before growing back. However, two of these can only go from the hydra equivalent from adolescent to child; like the victim of some uncensored fairy tale, sexual reproduction locks them into adulthood. T. dohrniiinstead, it seems able to transition from its freefloating adult stage to the lower life polyp, known as lifecycle reversal (LCR), as many times as it wants.
An article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides a comparison T. dorhnii i T. rubra with the hope that the differences will be clarified, also incorporating some more distant cnidarian types.
Dr. Maria PascualTorner of the University of Oviedo, Spain, and her coauthors found no single genetic trick that appears to provide the fountain of youth. Instead, they discovered a wide variety of potential collaborators, reporting; “We identified variants and gene expansions associated with replication, DNA repair, telomere maintenance, the redox environment, stem cell population, and intercellular communication.”
This Turritopsis dohrnii polyp comes from a colony spawned by a single rejuvenated jellyfish. Image credit: Maria PascualTorner
All of this could prove important, but the study focused on two significant aspects T. dohrnii’s genome absent in its relative. One of these silences the polycomb repressive complexes: 2 families of proteins that regulate gene expression. The other activates pluripotency, the ability of a stem cell to become any type of cell it needs to become, during life cycle reversal.
Applying them to humans will certainly be a herculean task if possible. However, while many of T. dorhnii’The features probably work only in combination, some of which can provide a few extra years of health in more complex creatures, including us.
As the paper notes: “Natural selection declines with age.” Only in rare cases, such as orca grandmothers, are there many evolutionary benefits to living long, healthy lives after ceasing to reproduce. Consequently, nature has done little to ensure that it occurs; we’ll have to figure out how to make it happen ourselves, with just T. dorhnii to guide us
Even T. dohrnii it doesn’t live forever. In fact, the typical specimen has a much shorter life expectancy than yours, this being the sad consequence of a small life form with few defenses and tasty to jellyfish and larger fish. Presumably, this is why they have not come to dominate the Earth as we might expect an immortal species to do. However, his ability to rejuvenate makes him theoretically capable of eternal life, which is only suspected in one other species and not confirmed in any.