All articles tagged with #lamprey
Chinese researchers have built the first 3D spatial single-cell atlas of the lamprey brain, enabling reconstruction of ancestral vertebrate brain features and revealing conserved gene expression and neurogenesis patterns with mammals; published as a Science cover article on June 19, 2026, the work suggests early vertebrate brains were already well-partitioned and provides a new resource for brain-evolution studies.
A science feature highlights six ancient fish lineages—coelacanth, sturgeon, lungfish, lamprey, hagfish, and paddlefish—that have persisted for hundreds of millions of years, offering insights into vertebrate evolution while slowly evolving at the genetic level, and notes how modern threats like habitat loss and pollution endanger these evolutionary treasures.
Lockheed Martin unveiled Lamprey, a modular autonomous undersea vehicle that can hitch a ride on ships or submarines, recharge during missions, and launch drones, torpedoes, and decoys while carrying its own sensors. It can lie in wait on the seabed or operate near the surface, enabling covert surveillance, distributed sensing, and potential sea-denial capabilities. Questions remain about endurance, range, cost, and current development stage as the concept signals a broader move toward autonomous, distributed undersea warfare.
Australian researchers发现 endangered Australian brook lampreys (Mordacia praecox) much farther north than previously known, on Fraser Island (K’gari) in Queensland, challenging the idea that lampreys are limited to southern regions and underscoring conservation concerns as climate-driven habitat changes threaten their streams; the finding, published in Endangered Species Research in 2024, could also inform neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
Researchers have debunked a long-held belief that lamprey, a type of jawless fish, lack sympathetic neurons, which are part of the peripheral nervous system. New research led by Marianne Bronner's lab at Caltech has found that sympathetic neurons do exist in lamprey but arise much later in development than previously thought, revising the timeline of sympathetic nervous system evolution. This discovery suggests that the developmental program governing the formation of sympathetic neurons is evolutionarily conserved across all vertebrates, from lamprey to mammals.
Lampreys may use body-sensing feedback to regain swimming abilities after spinal injury, according to a mathematical model developed by researchers at Bucknell University and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The model showed that even in the absence of descending command across the spinal lesion, boosting sensory feedback could restore locomotion. Lampreys recover quickly and almost completely after severe lesions high up in the spinal cord, despite only a small percentage of neurons and neuronal connections being restored across the injury. The study could inspire new therapeutic approaches in humans or algorithms for locomotion in soft robots.