A beautiful marine creature with a jelly-like body surrounded by iridescent combs. The most likely candidate for the earliest branched-off animal lineage. And now, an impossible nervous system. Comb jellies may be too small to even cause ripples in the water as they swim, but their unique features are creating shockwaves in the scientific community.
A recent study, published in Science, looked closely at the nerve-net neurons of comb jellies and found that instead of being connected by synapses – junctions between neurons in all other animals, including humans – they are continuously connected by a single plasma membrane.
Comb jellies, or ctenophores, belong to phylum ctenophora, and are one of the oldest animal lineages with a defined nervous system. They are quite hard to culture in the lab, however, yet Pawel Burkhardt managed to do just the thing in his lab at the Michael Sars Centre at the University of Bergen, Norway.
