Purdue researcher working to harness power of sea slugs

“These were high-risk, high-reward proposals,” Widhalm said. “Not only can we learn a lot about basic cell biology, but there are opportunities to put that knowledge to use in so many ways.”

POTENTIAL USES

Transferring the sea slugs’ ability to retain chloroplasts in their cells to other organisms or synthetic cells has the potential to usher in a “giant leap” for synthetic biology, with the lessons learned being applicable to so many other areas.

Photosynthesis requires light and carbon dioxide. If photosynthesis could be introduced as a trait packaged and delivered via organellar transfer, designer cells could be engineered to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and impact climate change.

Mitochondrial diseases affect a cell’s ability to produce energy. Understanding how to insert organelles without damaging the host cell could allow for new clinical treatments for repairing or replacing defective organelles in those suffering from hard-to-treat illnesses.

Drug development might also be improved. Yeast and microbial cells often need sugars to consume during the process of creating new molecules. Eliminating the need for fixed carbon input could improve the sustainability and cost efficiency of engineering valuable products.

Widhalm and his graduate students have spent the last year working with a single aquarium setup and attempting to successfully rear sea slugs through their life cycles in captivity. They’ve now gotten the creatures to reproduce and the offspring to feed on cultured algae and metamorphose into green adults.

Now, Widhalm has obtained funding to develop a more elaborate aquarium system with multiple areas for culturing algae, holding slugs at different stages of their lives and monitoring water chemistry.

With support from a 2020 Showalter Research Trust award, Widhalm’s team is focused on answering questions about sea slug cell biology. In addition to their team award from Research Corporation, Widhalm, Landry and Weng were also recently funded by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop tools for studying sea slug genes. Through a Center for Plant Biology seed grant, Widhalm is also working with collaborator Jennifer Wisecaver, assistant professor of biochemistry, to sequence the Elysia clarki genome.

“We can learn so much about whether the slugs modify the chloroplasts in any way before taking them in and how they control chloroplast function,” Widhalm said. “It’s early in the work, but with our new setup and the tools we are developing with our collaborators, we expect to learn a lot about this awesome evolutionary phenomenon.”