- [Narrator] Octopuses are
the weirdest animal on earth,
and I know what you're thinking.
Is it because they have
three hearts or blue blood
or that they can regrowth their limbs
or that they're known to use tools
or they can change colors
whenever they want?
Of course all that is pretty cool,
but it's just the beginning.
Turns out octopuses and
their close colloid relatives
have a unique ability to edit
significant amounts of their RNA,
and they've been doing this
long before modern humans
showed up on the scene about
200 thousand years ago.
While scientists aren't
sure how or why it started,
studies suggest that octopuses
today are editing their RNA
to adapt to temperature
changes in their environment.
RNA is sort of like DNA editing,
but in some ways even better.
- You can think of it as a spell checking.
If you have a Word document
that you want to change the information,
you take one letter you
place it with another.
- [Narrator] But what
makes RNA editing different
from DNA editing is the long-term effects.
Your DNA for instance
is identical in each one
of your trillions of adult cells.
So changing the code in one
cell changes it forever,
and it fundamentally alters your genome
which is passed down to your children
and every generation thereafter,
and this is how the majority
of the animal kingdom evolves,
but octopuses do things differently
by also editing their RNA.
This allows them try out
adaptions in the short term
without messing with
entire generations to come.
- In this aspect RNA mutations
or RNA editing events
are much less dangerous.
You can play with the RNA.
You can test many possibilities
without damaging the master copy
of your genetic information.
- [Narrator] Unlike DNA changes
to RNA are not hereditary.
It also means you can
target certain body parts
and edit the RNA in them individually.
In fact research groups have discovered
that octopuses tend to edit the RNA
in their brain tissue
more than anywhere else,
which has led some experts to hypothesize
this is why octopuses
are the most intelligent
of all invertebrates in the planet.
Now most organisms including humans
have the enzyme necessary for RNA editing,
but the general consensus is
it's just not worth the effort.
Humans for example have
around 10 RNA editing sites,
but octopuses have tens of thousands.
- It's really a completely new story.
- [Narrator] So octopuses
and their colloid cousins
truly are bizarre,
but it may not be the
case for too much longer.
Scientists have recently proven ways
of using CRISPR to edit RNA too.
Perhaps they can learn a
thing or two from the experts.
(bouncy music)
