A new study has revealed that the cells that make up the human body may be capable of ‘learning’, a process once thought to be exclusive to complex creatures with brains, including birds and mammals.
Habituation is a simple form of learning in which a person’s response to a certain trigger decreases upon repeated exposure. This is the way a person learns to ignore things that happen frequently, like the ticking of a clock. Habit can also help people face their fears.
The researchers, led by Harvard researchers, said the study presented “compelling evidence” that single-celled organisms such as amoeba, as well as cells in the human body, show habituation similar to that seen in complex organisms with brains and nervous systems. Can. Medical School, US, and Center for Genomic Regulation, Spain.
The results, published in the journal Current Biology, add to a small but growing body of evidence in this field and deepen our understanding of how learning and memory work at the most fundamental level of life, he said.
“This discovery opens up an exciting new mystery for us: how do cells without a brain manage something so complex?” said senior author Jeremy Gunawardena, associate professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.
Gunawardena’s team was the first to document evidence of a single-celled ciliate exhibiting escape behavior, similar to that seen in animals when they encounter unpleasant situations. Ciliates use the hairs on their surface to move and eat.
The researchers said the findings showed that a cell is capable of more complex behavior than is currently appreciated.
For the study, researchers used computer models to analyze how molecules inside the cells of ciliates and mammals respond to different patterns of stimulation, or something that triggers a physiological or behavioral change.
They found four networks of molecules that displayed habitual traits, commonly seen in animal brains. Each molecular network was found to have two forms of “memory” storage that capture information learned from the environment.
Furthermore, one form of memory was found to decay much faster than the other – a form of memory loss that is essential for habituation, the researchers noted.
If single cells can “remember”, it could also help explain how cancer cells develop resistance to chemotherapy or how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics – situations where cells learn from their environment. “Learning”, he said.
However, the team said these possibilities would need to be explored with real-world biological data.
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