How A Jellyfish Without A Brain Figured Out Immortality

What the film says

1. A 1996 paper by four researchers, Piraino, Boero, Aeschbach and Schmid ('Reversing the life cycle'), documented life-cycle reversal.

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2. When damaged, stressed or aging, the medusa transforms into a cyst in which cells transdifferentiate, then becomes a polyp again.

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3. The species is believed to be spreading worldwide through ballast water; Maria Miglietta called it 'a worldwide silent invasion'.

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4. Texas A&M-linked researchers (Matsumoto, Piraino, Miglietta) compared transcriptomes of the polyp, medusa and cyst stages.

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5. In 2022 Pascual-Torner and colleagues published comparative genomes of T. dohrnii and the non-immortal T. rubra in PNAS.

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6. The 2022 study found gene variants and expansions linked to DNA repair and telomere maintenance, and pluripotency targets activated during life-cycle reversal.

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7. Miglietta published a critique in PNAS in 2023, and Pascual-Torner and Quesada replied.

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8. A 2008 study comparing immortal jellyfish from Spain, Italy, Japan, Florida and Panama found that all the genes examined were identical.

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9. Adult Turritopsis dohrnii reach only about 4.5 mm and have a bright red stomach.

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