SEARCH TO DEFY DEATH

Abstract

Turritopsis dohrnii has been identified to be an “immortal” species. It has been observed that T. dohrnii have the ability to revert back to its juvenile polyp state once exposed to stress or threat. Such capability of reverting into its polyp stage could be due to some special genetic make-up present in the jellyfish or perhaps due to the environment, the blue zone area, where the jellyfishes are usually present. The research aims to predict and understand whether environment or the presence of a particular gene is responsible for the unique trait of Turritopsis dohrnii. Therefore, in order to determine the “immortal” gene, the closely related species of the jellyfish was first studied and both pairwise and multiple alignment using Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) and ClustalW was performed. The research used bioinformatic tool, MEGA to construct a phylogenetic tree using 16S ribosomal RNA sequence for certain species of the jellyfish belonging to the medusozoa clade, taken from various geographical locations. Once the research establishes that the environment is the not the major reason for the arise of such unique trait, it can then proceed towards determining the sequence of interest and try to understand its expression followed by protein modelling.