Loopy Lens Proteins Provide Squid With Excellent Eyesight

摘要

When Alison Sweeney wanted to learn about eye evolution, she went to sea. While the ship rolled beneath her, she dissected the eyes of squid freshly retrieved from 1000 meters below and tested how well each lens resolved the details of a panel of ever-narrower black and white stripes. Back at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, as a graduate student in the lab of Sonke Johnsen, she combined those results with biochemical and modeling data on the optical and chemical properties of lens proteins to reconstruct the history of vision in cephalopods—squid, octopi, and their relatives. From just one ancestral lens protein—vertebrates started with several—these marine invertebrates have evolved lens-based eyesight more than once, Sweeney reported at the meeting.