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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.
Spending your life hanging out at the seaside might sound like easy living. But for marine1 mussels, a day at the shore is no walk on the beach. Clinging to a boulder2 in the intertidal zone, a mussel might find that the temperature of its environment changes 50 degrees in a matter of hours, depending on whether it’s bathed in cool seawater or baking in the sun. To handle such challenges, mussels have evolved a sophisticated strategy for systematically3 turning on and off the genes5 they need to survive.
Scientists from the University of Southern California spent a few days sampling mussel beds just south of the Monterey Bay Aquarium6. Every few hours, they collected the mussels’ genetic7 material and spread it on a gene4 chip to figure out which genes were active, and when. To their surprise, they found that mussels coordinate8 their gene activity in waves, alternating between genes responsible for growing and genes responsible for eating. And the harsher the environment, the more pronounced the oscillations, results that appear in the October 9th issue of Current Biology. It’s not yet clear what drives these gene cycles. But it seems that even mussels know that you gotta ride the wave if you want to avoid a wipeout.
Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.
1 marine | |
adj.海的;海生的;航海的;海事的;n.水兵 | |
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2 boulder | |
n.巨砾;卵石,圆石 | |
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3 systematically | |
adv.有系统地 | |
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4 gene | |
n.遗传因子,基因 | |
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5 genes | |
n.基因( gene的名词复数 ) | |
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6 aquarium | |
n.水族馆,养鱼池,玻璃缸 | |
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7 genetic | |
adj.遗传的,遗传学的 | |
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8 coordinate | |
adj.同等的,协调的;n.同等者;vt.协作,协调 | |
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