Animals have long provided important insights in terms of various issues affecting humankind, and recently, a study has found that flowerpot snakes – one of the world’s smallest snakes – could help in understanding conditions such as Down syndrome.
As it happens, the flowerpot snake, also called the Brahminy blind snake (Indotyphlops braminus), is the only known snake species with three sets of chromosomes instead of two, is able to reproduce without a mate, and can repair its DNA, according to the phys.org report published on April 2.
Implications in human genetics
Specifically, scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington are studying how the flowerpot snake repairs its DNA and prevents harmful mutations, offering important insights into genetic repair mechanisms that could help better understand human gene evolution.
Indeed, as Matthew Fujita, a professor of biology at UTA and a co-author of the study published in the journal Science Advances, alongside researchers from China and Myanmar, explained, this behavior of flowerpot snakes’ DNA allows them to produce exact genetic clones of themselves:
“This DNA repair and replication activity supports a fascinating mechanism called premeiotic endoreplication, a process through which the snake duplicates its chromosomes before dividing them, sidestepping the need for the typical pairing of chromosomes seen in sexual reproduction.”
Thanks to insights from the tiny reptile’s genetic and reproductive tricks, researchers can learn more about human trisomy conditions, such as Down syndrome, considering that animals with multiple sets of chromosomes, albeit rare, “survive just fine with three instead of the normal two humans have.”
Notably, the researchers found that the flowerpot snake has 40 chromosomes divided into three subgenomes formed through complex genetic events such as chromosome fusion in ancestral species, leading them to hypothesize that this allows it to reproduce without needing sperm from a male partner.
What’s more, the Africa- and Asia-native flowerpot snake appears to have developed a mechanism to eliminate the risk of harmful mutations that could happen over time due to the lack of genetic shuffling, common in asexual species, thanks to its slow but steady evolutionary pace.
Flowerpot snakes and their DNA
The mechanism, evident in genetic variations across different flowerpot snake populations, suggests chromosome exchanges between the subgenomes, which seem to balance the species’ genetic diversity and stability, resulting in enough variation for adaptation while preventing reproduction-disrupting incompatibilities.
As Fujita further noted:
“This finding provides key insights into how reproduction without a mate works in reptiles, but it also reshapes some of our long-held views about the limitations of asexual species. Rather than being an evolutionary ‘dead end’ as researchers have thought, the flowerpot snake shows how nature can innovate and adapt in extraordinary ways.”
Meanwhile, scientists have developed a chromatin tracing method to observe how a human cell archives the process in which chromosomes form an X-shaped structure when preparing for transport to daughter cells during cell division, facilitating a more detailed view into DNA loops than ever before.
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