The researchers found the first known multicellular parasitic animal to breathe without oxygen

News Agency, Jerusalem, February 27 (Reporter Shang Yu Chen Wenxian) Generally believe that aerobic breathing is a basic characteristic of multicellular animals. But Tel Aviv University in Israel has announced that its research team has discovered the first known multicellular parasite on Earth that can survive without oxygen.
the animal, called salmon sticky spores, is a parasite that lives in salmon muscles and consists of less than 10 cells.
The team, led by zoologist Dorothy Yuxiong of Tel Aviv University, tested and sequenced the salmon sticky spore worm gene and found that, unlike all other known animals, the parasite does not have a mitochondrial genome associated with respiratory action and loses almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcription and replication of mitochondrial genomes, meaning they do not have the ability to breathe aerobically.
researchers say aerobic breathing is the process by which cells produce energy, a finding that means salmon sticky spores don't need oxygen to produce energy. The researchers speculate that they may have absorbed energy from surrounding salmon cells, or they may have evolved a survival method similar to that of a single-celled hypothetic organism. But further research is needed to find out.
researchers believe that biological evolution is generally moving in a complex direction. But salmon sticky spores survive by eliminating many of the characteristics associated with multicellular animals, which have lost tissue, nerve cells, muscles and the ability to breathe aerobically, making them simpler animals.
researchers say the findings confirm that adaptability to anaerobic environments is not unique to single-celled ucleytes, and that multicellular parasites can also be obtained through evolution, providing the possibility of understanding the evolution of organisms from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism.
the study was published in the
Journal of National Journal of Science.