Octopuses and squid can recode the majority of their neural proteins in a matter of days. It's pretty incredible!
and they are a reliable proxy for other octopuses. Wild octopuses are exposed to quick changes in temperature like when they dive to colder depths or during upwelling events and slower changes like when the seasons shift.
They acclimated wild-caught adult octopuses to warm or cold waters in tanks and after several weeks, they compared the RNA transcripts for the acclimated octopuses to the genome to find signs of RNA editing. “One surprising finding was the fact that so many proteins, so many editing sites had changed upon temperature change, and all of them almost all of them in the same direction,” says Eisenberg.. The proteins edited tended to be neural proteins, and almost all edited sites sensitive to temperature swings were more highly edited in the cold, according to Eisenberg.
To see how quickly these changes occurred, they investigated the reaction in tiny thumbnail-sized juvenile octopuses. They gradually heated or cooled the tanks from 57.2°F up to 93.2°F and vice versa in hourly increments over about 20 hours. After measuring RNA editing before the temperature change, immediately after the change, and four days later, the team was surprised by just how rapidly it occurred.
The team also started investigating if recoding impacted protein structure function. They focused on two proteins that are critical for nervous system function—
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