Biologists Search for New Model Organisms
- Aug 2, 2016
- 3 min read
The bulk of biological research is centered on a handful of species. Are we missing a huge chunk of life's secrets?
Ever since he was a student in the late 19th century, the Columbia University zoologist Thomas Hunt Morgan would flee the city heat to spend his summer in the seaside village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The Marine Biological Laboratory there offered a bounty of biological diversity to explore. Morgan investigated regeneration in hermit crabs, cellr division in sea urchins, embryonic development in frogs, and sex determination in aphids. He moved from animal to animal with a dizzying agility unheard of in contemporary biologists, uncovering major insights into basic biology with each foray.
Then in the early 1900s, Morgan was looking for an organism to test some of Charles Darwin’s theories. He heard about an insect that was easy to raise in the lab and produced hundreds of progeny every few weeks. This insect — the fruit fly — sounded like just the right animal for the job.
It was. Morgan used fruit flies to show that chromosomes are the basis of inheritance, a discovery that set the stage for modern genetics and earned him the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Morgan became one of the most revered biologists of the 20th century, but his scientific fame would never compete with that of his subject, which has become nearly synonymous with biological research. The fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has morphed into a test system to study the inner workings of biology — a model organism. Scientists study model organisms with the aim of understanding biology more broadly, including issues applicable to human health.
In the decades since Morgan began breeding his flies, the model organism approach has blossomed. The lion’s share of biological research today is centered on a select group of species — fruit flies, the roundworm C. elegans, zebrafish, mice and a few others. These animals are easy to grow in the lab, and researchers have developed an arsenal of tools for analyzing and modifying their genomes. The animals have had an enormous impact on our understanding of both basic biology and disease, earning scientists dozens of Nobel Prizes.
But some scientists argue that biology needs a taste of Morgan’s pre-fly days, when scientists studied a panoply of organisms. They argue that by focusing on roughly seven animals out of the estimated 9 million species on Earth, we are missing a huge chunk of interesting biology. “We are due for a renaissance,” said Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a biologist at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri. “We have narrowed our focus to a handful of organisms that statistically are highly unlikely to encompass the gamut of biological activity on the planet.”
In June, Sánchez Alvarado and a few other scientists convened a panel of experts at Woods Hole’s Marine Biological Laboratory to discuss the development of new model species. The researchers want to combine the best of both worlds — narrow and broad — taking advantage of both nature’s diversity and the wealth of tools and knowledge that amass from focusing on specific species. “Most of the biological world lies before us unexplored and unknown,” said Jonathan Gitlin, MBL’s director of research. “If most of what we know comes from seven organisms, imagine what we would know if we had 700.”
Read more at: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160726-model-organisms/
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