Environmental News Network - Crustacean’s Life in Low-Oxygen Water Suggests There’s More Than One Way to Survive Hypoxia

Details: By Oregon State University; 20.Jun

A tidepool crustacean’s ability to survive oxygen deprivation though it lacks a key set of genes raises the possibility that animals might have more ways of dealing with hypoxic environments than had been thought.

Mohammad Munshed

A tidepool crustacean’s ability to survive oxygen deprivation though it lacks a key set of genes raises the possibility that animals might have more ways of dealing with hypoxic environments than had been thought.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings by Oregon State University researchers are important because hypoxia – areas of low oxygen – is on the rise in waters around the globe, largely because of human-caused factors such as agricultural runoff, fossil-fuel burning and wastewater treatment effluent.

Hypoxia presents a major physiological challenge for animals; whose evolutionary history includes the development of cellular mechanisms to address changes in oxygen availability. The HIF pathway – hypoxia-inducible factor – is the primary mechanism animals use to sense and regulate oxygen levels.

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Crustacean’s Life in Low-Oxygen Water Suggests There’s More Than One Way to Survive Hypoxia