First Genome-Edited Horseshoe Crabs | The Grass Foundation Blog

This blog post from The Grass Foundation highlights 2024 Grass Fellow Guilherme Gainett, who researched the development of horseshoe crab eyes at the Marine Biological Laboratory in summer 2024.

We may call them “crabs,” but horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to the crustaceans they share their coastal homes with. The four species in existence today can be found along the east coasts of North America and South Asia, descendants of creatures found in the fossil record as far back as 445 million years. Sometimes called “living fossils,” the horseshoe crabs we see today have changed little in the last 250 million years. After all, when it comes to evolution, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

In 1967, Haldan Keffer Hartline won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research on the eyes of horseshoe crabs, but in the decades that followed, the research on these animals’ unique biology slowed down considerably. 

This has long puzzled 2024 Grass Fellow Guilherme Gainett, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University. As a development biologist, he is fascinated by these ancient creatures and what their eyes can teach us about the evolution of sensory systems. Read the rest of the story here.

Source: First Genome-Edited Horseshoe Crabs | The Grass Foundation Blog