A new study, led by researchers from CIIMAR and FCUP, associates the extraordinary ability that snakes have to survive without eating to the evolutionary loss of a key hormone that regulates hunger.
Snakes are known for their ability to survive months without eating, an aspect that has intrigued scientists around the world for decades.
A new international study, led by researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center for Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR) and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, reveals that this extraordinary feat may be linked to the evolutionary loss of a hormones key that regulates hunger.
The work of the team, in Royal Society Open Biology, shows that snakes lost the gene responsible for the production of ghrelina hormone that, in most vertebrates, stimulates appetite and helps control energy metabolism.
According to the study authors, this genetic change appears to have allowed a profound physiological reorganizationwhich favors the storage and efficient use of energy, allowing these reptiles to survive months without eating.
“This study shows how evolution can produce radical adaptations not only through the emergence of new genes, but also through the strategic loss of old functions,” he explains. Rui Resende Pinto, researcher at CIIMAR and PhD student in Biology at the Faculty of Sciences of the U.Porto (FCUP), in UP.
“By losing ghrelin, snakes appear to have created alternative mechanisms to control appetite and manage energy reserves, becoming true experts in surviving long periods of food scarcity”, adds the researcher.
For scientists, this discovery helps to better understand how vertebrates can adapt to extreme and unpredictable environments, where food availability is irregular.
Filipe Castroleader of the research group in Animal Genetics and Evolution at CIIMAR and professor at FCUP, highlights the wider impact of discovery. “This work reinforces a fundamental idea in evolutionary biology: losing genes can be as important as gaining new ones.”
“Snakes show us how evolution can profoundly reconfigure complex physiological systems, opening new perspectives for understanding energy metabolism and even related human diseases with appetite and metabolism control”, adds the researcher.
The study authors emphasize that understanding these natural mechanisms may, in the future, contribute to new approaches to the study of obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
