Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CNIDARIAMICRORNA (Elucidation of the evolution of post-transcriptional regulation by characterizing the cnidarian microRNA pathway)
Période du rapport: 2019-11-01 au 2020-04-30
1. microRNAs play an important role in the physiology of ‘lower animals’ such as sea anemones and not only in higher animals
2. The state of the microRNA-based regulation system in sea anemones seems to be a possible “evolutionary intermediate” between the system of higher animals and plants.
We believe that such results have an impact on the way we think about the evolution of gene regulation as biologists. Further, as they have implications on the evolutionary history of animals we believe that society benefits from this research as many people even outside of the scientific community are fascinated by nature and especially by animals. At the end of the day, humans are interested in their origin and their ancient roots and our research implicates how ancient animals from the lineage that led to us humans functioned on the molecular and genomic levels hundreds of millions of years ago.