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Glycera dibranchiata is exactly the kind of creature you wouldn’t want to find at the bottom of your beach bucket. They are called bloodworms for their translucent skin. The long, venomous worms are native to both coasts of North America and have four sharp teeth and a somewhat grumpy temperament: As they pierce the sand, they attack anything they feel nearby.
“They’re very protective of their lawn,” said Herbert Waite, professor who studies the creatures at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “I think they are basically introverts.”
When disgruntled, worms launch a peculiarly structured proboscis to grasp their prey.
“If your head were a balloon, you can normally imagine it being sucked inside your body. Then, when you want to eat it, you inflate it, bite it, and then suck it back,” says William Wonderly, a chemist at Santa Barbara who worked with Dr. Waite to study the creatures. They’re pulling.”
Worms have another feature that is less obvious but just as weird. Sprouting from specialized cells in their skin, their teeth are demonically tough and made up of only three components, including melanin. While melanin is one of the pigments behind human skin and hair color, bloodworms somehow turn it into a hard material infused with copper, which makes up 10 percent by weight of teeth. But how the worms performed the chemical transformation used to be a mystery.
In An article published Monday in Matter magazine, Dr. Wonderly, Dr. Waite and colleagues revealed that the creatures do this by relying on the third component in teeth, a deceptively simple protein with many abilities. The finding uncovers a biochemical secret of this unusual creature and highlights how nature has come up with surprisingly simple ways to create complex anatomical features.
Dr. Wonderly said a bloodworm’s teeth grow from a series of cells that act as receptacles and store the materials needed for their assembly. The team studied the proteins used in these cells and identified a protein called the multitasking protein as the main component of the final product. This protein, they report in the new paper, is mainly made of just two amino acids, a small number, but plays a crucial role in tooth formation.
The scientists found that the protein catalyzes a reaction and recruits copper ions to form melanin. It then binds the melanin to the polymers, assembles itself and melanin into one structure, and uses the copper to insulate everything together. Dr. Essentially, the multitasking protein seems to displace melanin from its tendency to form into blemishes that you’ll see microscopically on human hair and skin, Wonderly said. This makes it something completely different: part of a deadly killing machine hiding in the sand.
Not all mysteries of the bloodworm are solved: Little is understood about how the organism first developed this system and how copper is processed in the worm’s body.
Dr. “A big question is how is the copper concentrated in the jaws,” Wonderly said. “You’re going to need baby worms to really understand. But because they have a complex spawning cycle, they are difficult to grow in the lab.”
By watching how melanin is produced and how the worm builds it from precursors in its body, the team hopes to learn more about how worms assemble this unusual polymer.
Dr. “There are a lot of things nature is thinking about how to do it very efficiently and intelligently,” Waite said. “It takes basic science and childlike curiosity to uncover it.”
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