Today, I discovered that bryostatin—a promising bioactive compound extracted from bryozoan colonies with potential medical applications for Alzheimer’s, cancers, and HIV therapy—is actually produced by bacterial symbionts:
Tag: bryozoa
Bryozoa is the group of colonial invertebrates known as moss animals.
This is a bryozoan embryo with its blastopore facing us. The blastopore is the hole in the middle. The “balls” are the nuclei of the cells that make up the embryo. While cells have many other structures, they are not visible in this image. The only thing visible is the DNA because I stained it […]
Video summary about our work on bryozoan development and the evolution of cleavage patterns published in BMC Biology!
What happens when cleavage patterns evolve? Some insights from bryozoan embryonic development: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-017-0371-9
The first 24 hours in 1.5 minutes of bryozoan embryos.
The BEST footage of bryozoan life cycle on the internet. Meet the coronate larva of Bugula neritina. Wow!
The name cyphonautes was created by Ehrenberg (1834), who first saw the tiny creature on Nov. 25, 1832 (Hyman 1959).
Elegant schematic drawing of a bryozoan cyphonautes larva from 1907 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/10304879#page/324/mode/1up Thanks to @BioDivLibrary. Made me smile :)
After the illustration, this is a living cyphonautes larva collected from the plankton.