It was early morning in my office when my colleague, Boris, entered with the big, enthusiastic smile. It's 7 AM, what weird idea he got, I wonder...
B: Hey Alex, do we have some spin-trap, I made the extracts from Bryozoa!
A: Bryo-what? (Bryo - moss, zoa - animal)
B: My friend, scuba-diver brought me a bunch of them. Plus, I have the paper about moss-plant extracts, I would like to do it with the moss-animals!
He came a few days later with the slimy, smelly goo with the weirdest gray-brown color I have ever seen.
After suppressing the reflex to vomit, I somehow put it in EPR. I usually have a strong stomach but this was the grossest thing I touched.
Phylum Bryozoa:
There are some 2.000 species of Bryozoa, mostly inhabiting sea water but some freshwater Bryozoa are known.
Evolutionary origin of those blobs - we have no idea.
We can't even determine if they are protostomia or deuterostomia (what is the first hole that formes, mouth or anus).
We know them from the fossil record and during the Paleozoic, Bryozoa species (some 15.000 of them) were among the dominant life forms.
Morphology:
Respiration - done by all the cells
Excretion - done by all cells
Circulatory system - who needs it
Stomack - with some "teeth-like structures"
More pictures:
Archimedus screw
Importance:
As they don't harm us, nor we eat them - nothing special.
However, some extracts showed drug-like structures, cytotoxic effect, and antitumor effects.
Keep in mind that it doesn't means that Bryozoan extracts are the cure for cancer!
It means that it can kill some cells in a Petri dish, just as 56465645 other molecules
Sources:
- General
- Pejin, Boris, et al. "Antioxidant volatiles of the freshwater bryozoan Hyalinella punctata." Natural product research 28.18 (2014): 1471-1475. link
- Morphology
- Pejin, Boris, Miloš Mojović, and Aleksandar G. Savić. "Novel antitumour natural products from the phylum Bryozoa." Biologia Serbica 35.1-2 (2014).
- Images