Shock the system! In a good way?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
All vertebrates use electricity to move our muscles. But fish and eels can actually emit that electricity! How?
Enter Sarah LaPotin and team from the University of Texas, Austin.
The electric impulse that helps muscles move comes from a molecule: a sodium channel. Electric fish use a duplicated AND an altered copy of the sodium channel to make electricity.
Researchers altered the genes producing both types of the molecules. They did this in electric, and non-electric fish. Then, they watched the muscle development of baby fish to see what changed!
And?
Altering or deleting one segment of the gene had a big impact. Non-electric baby fish made sixty-two TIMES less of the molecule without it! But that segment is already altered, or GONE, in electric fish. Researchers believe this lets them turn on the ZAP, without affecting their own muscles.
And that finding should create a lot of BUZZ!
Reference: LaPotin, S., M. E. Swartz, D. M. Luecke, S. J. Constantinou, J. R. Gallant, J. K. Eberhart, and H. H. Zakon. 2022. Divergent cis-regulatory evolution underlies the convergent loss of sodium channel expression in electric fish. Science advances 8:eabm2970.