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The Rigakubu News

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

The Rigakubu News
Published in The Rigakubu News November 2024

Science in Essays>

A dream inspired by Pokémon: Genomes and Morphogenesis

KYOGO KAWAGUCHI, Associate Professor, Institute for Physics of Intelligence

I am a physicist who loves living things and studies life phenomena, but I have never been an insect boy or kept animals for a long time. My interest in living things began not with real creatures, but with Pokemon.

As a child, I was addicted to Pokemon on my black-and-white Game Boy. One of the projects in a children's science magazine I was reading at the time was to send in cartridges containing saved Pokémon raised in the game, and the editors would let the readers battle the Pokémon to see who had the best Pokémon. This was before official Pokémon battle tournaments were held. I could not enter the contest because I lived overseas, but I was surprised when I read the results. The winner was a level 100 Poppo using moves such as "Mushroom Houhou" and "Fubuki".

A white specimen of a sparrow (left) given to me by a lab member when he moved to Tokyo. A white bone specimen of a Okinawa rail (right) at the Abiko City Museum of Birds.
The backbone of birds, like that of humans and other mammals, is divided into several regions, but there is diversity in the way it is divided, and the principle behind this is not yet understood.

Poppo is a relatively weak Pokémon that appears early in the game and is usually evolved into a stronger Pokémon during the process of raising it. In addition, the number of techniques that Poppo can learn is limited depending on its species, and Poppo cannot learn powerful techniques such as "Fubuki". This Poppo was probably created by a subterfuge, disguising a strong Pokémon called Mewtwo and modifying it to learn a technique called "Mushroom Act," which can put an opponent 100% to sleep, a technique that only a few Pokémon, namely Pallas and Parasecto, can learn.

In the original Pokémon games, there was a widespread underhanded trick that involved causing a buffer overflow through relatively simple operations, and then rewriting the data through unauthorized access to the memory. The success rate depended on the progress of the game and the version of the cartridge, and the joy of creating the Pokémon you wanted after a lot of trial and error was exceptional.

With the advancement of molecular biology, it is now possible to transplant genes from one creature into another and make them glow. However, it is still impossible to modify a human to swim like a dolphin or to grow wings on a mouse to look like a bat. There are ethical issues involved in modifying the body, and of course there is a lack of technology. The morphogenesis of organisms is extremely complex, and while local changes are possible, large-scale modifications, such as turning Mewtwo into Poppo, are still difficult.

Is it possible to reveal which gene sequence corresponds to which morphology by comparing various species? We recently became interested in this question and focused on patterns in the number of vertebrae (backbones) in tetrapods, collecting data from museum records and specimens of several hundred species of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The number of vertebrae is the basis of our vertebrate body blueprint. We combined this with phylogenetic trees showing how various species have evolved and gene sequences to search for the emergence and disappearance of vertebrae number rules during the course of evolution.

As a result, interesting patterns emerged. In mammals, the number of cervical vertebrae (neck bones) is almost fixed at seven, but the total number of vertebrae in multiple regions tends to remain constant even when the number of vertebrae in other specific regions changes. In birds, the number of vertebrae in the front and back of the body axis tended to be balanced. This was a previously unknown pattern, and it was as if we had discovered a unique status distribution rule for Pokémon with the ability to fly.

The modification of living creatures, which could be achieved by backdoor tricks in games, is a more profound mystery in the real world than we can imagine. But perhaps that is the real thrill of life science. Although overwhelmed by its complexity, it is fun to solve the mysteries one by one. Just like when I was a child, I dream of new discoveries today.

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