JELLYFISH, despite their names, aren’t actually fish they are invertebrates, or animal without backbones related to corals and anemones. There are about 2,000 different jellyfish that have been identified.
An ocean full of jellyfish is a probable future, considering problems that ocean face at present. Changing ocean temperatures and ocean acidification has caused a shift in biodiversity of the ocean and distribution of jellyfish populations around the world. Jellyfish prefer warmer waters that are result of global climate change. Jellyfish have been able to bloom to record numbers, with less competition for space and resources due to overfishing and habitat destruction of many jellyfish predators like shark, tuna, swordfish, salmon and sea turtles.
However, there are positive aspects to jellyfish. Jellyfish, Aequorea, have special superpower, which is the ability to make light, a unique quality called bioluminescence. Studying jellyfish’s bioluminescence actually led to one of modern medicine’s most important tools. The discovery of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) from jellyfish has helped net two American and one Japanese scientists the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2008.
GFP is one of the most important tools biologists use for investigating how the molecular machinery in cells operates. In the early 80s, they actually cloned the gene that gave the jellyfish this green fluorescent protein. You can use that gene to label, make essentially a highlighter, that you can use in the lab for almost any process. So you can label where neurons are expressed, you can label where tumors are growing. This tool became so useful as a genetic highlighter. Attaching it to other proteins or structures allow scientists to watch a cell’s molecular cogs at work. This has given important insights into what goes wrong during disease.
