Role As A Model Organism
Long ignored as an exotic, marginal phenomenon, Trichoplax adhaerens is today viewed as a potential biological model organism. In particular, research is needed to determine how a group of cells that cannot be considered full-fledged epithelial tissue organizes itself, how locomotion and coordination occur in the absence of true muscle and nerve tissue, and how the absence of a concrete body axis affects the animal's biology. At the genetic level, the way in which Trichoplax adhaerens protects against damage to its genome needs to be studied, particularly with regard to the existence of special DNA-repair processes. Complete decoding of the genome should also clarify the placozoans' place in evolution, which continues to be controversial.
In addition to basic research, this animal could also be suitable for studying wound-healing and regeneration processes; as yet unidentified metabolic products should be researched. Finally, Trichoplax adhaerens is also being considered as an animal model for testing compounds.
Read more about this topic: Trichoplax Adhaerens
Famous quotes containing the words role, model and/or organism:
“Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)