Researchers discover Hydra DNA holds promise for studying disease

IRVINE - Led by a UC Irvine biologist, an international team of researchers has discovered that a primitive organism can be used in medical research in battling Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's disease, it was reported today.

Scientists were looking at genetic information of the Hydra -- a microscopic animal that lives in freshwater -- and discovered that each organism has 24,000 genes, roughly as many genes as a human, UCI said in a news release.

Not only that, the small creatures have similar genes to the particular human genes that mutate to cause Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's disease, UCI said. That makes the Hydra an easy and inexpensive lab animal for genetic research, which may bring major breakthroughs for the dread illnesses, UCI said.

Their findings were published online today in Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific journals.

"While Hydra doesn't have a brain, it does have a nervous system,'' said Rob Steele, chairman of biological chemisty at UC Irvine.

"So it might be interesting and informative to see what would happen,'' he said, if the mutated human disease-causing versions of human genes were spliced into the small creatures.

"I think Hydra's simplicity and ease of experimental manipulation make it an attractive system for exploring the basic mechanisms of biological processes that are relevant to human disease,'' Steele said. "And Hydra is really cheap to use a lab animal.''

The Hydra has been an animal getting a lot of scientific interest since the 1740s, when Abraham Trembley discovered that the freshwater polyp can regenerate new hands or feet if their limbs are cut off.