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In addition to its enormous size and long ivory tusks, the African bush elephant is known for its wrinkled and gray skin. Although its wrinkled skin may seem undesirable to us humans – who often pay hundreds of dollars a year to stay wrinkle free – its unattractive appearance serves an important purpose.
Researchers from University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics reported in the newspaper Nature Communications that the many crevices that make up the skin of an elephant are designed to help these mammals regulate their body temperature. The vast network of tiny crevices on the surface of the elephant holds water and mud, protecting its skin from parasites and intense sunlight.
African elephants are known to lack sweat and sebum glands, which help other mammals keep their skin moist and supple. So, to avoid overheating and get rid of pests, African elephants are constantly wallowing in the mud.
After receiving skin samples from scientists and museums in Switzerland, France and South Africa, the multidisciplinary team of researchers evaluated the samples and used a customized computer model to determine the skin functions of a patient. elephant. Careful inspection revealed that their skin was deeply carved by a complex network of extraordinarily small crevices, all interconnected. The tiny configuration of millions of channels prevents the formation of sludge and allows the spreading and retention of 5 to 10 times more water than on a flat surface.
The researchers used a computer model to show that the combination of hyper-keratinization of the skin, deficiency loss and the network of millimeter elevations can cause the accumulation of mechanical bending stresses between elevations of the skin when gradually thickening the skin. forming cracks.
One of the areas of interest in developmental biology is to discover how forms and forms are created by the differentiation and growth of heterogeneous tissues resulting from the differential expression of genes in the body. 39, whole body. However, complex phenotypes can also be the result of mechanical instabilities – such as wrinkles and wrinkles in an elephant's skin – caused by inadequate growth between adjacent tissue layers. Examples of this in our own body include the loop of our intestine and the folding of the cerebral cortex of our brain.
This study is the first to show that African elephant skin is characterized by a network of channels that not only resemble fissures, but also real physical cracks of the keratinized epidermis of the animal. They assume that the thickening of the keratinized epidermis of the African elephant is the result of an imbalance between its formation at the base and its excretion on the surface of the skin . This actually creates an interesting parallel with the morphology of the skin of these elephants and that of the man suffering from the ichthyosis vulgaris condition, a common genetic disease known to cause dry, flaky skin.
If these results are confirmed by molecular and cellular biology analyzes, their equivalence could be a significant link between a human pathology and the skin of another mammalian species.
"This correspondence would also show that similar mutations occurring independently in the evolutionary lineages of humans and elephants have proved unfavorable in the first and adaptable in the second, "says lead author Michel Milinkovitch, professor in the department of genetics and UNIGE faculty of science and group leader at SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
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By Connor Ertz, Earth.com Editor
Image credit: Michel Milinkovitch
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