Sara Jobson

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah.

So I have to first give credit to one of the collaborators in the paper, Emmy Montgomery, who was a graduate student just before Sarah.

And Emmy was the one to first say, why are there still feet in this space?

The feet became detached from the organism and they stayed in their general state for extended periods of time, days, weeks.

months.

And really, they shouldn't.

So in marine systems, they should degrade, bacteria should attack them, and they should pretty much disappear.

That didn't happen.

So when Emmy Montgomery discovered that these feet were still here, we wanted to understand why.

Yeah, that's part of the question that we're still trying to discover is what factors within the tube feet and the organism themselves allow them to persist under pretty significant bacterial pressure.

Yeah, I think that the understanding that we can gain from this is pretty impressive.

I mean, think about when you have an organ transplant or something like that, you're rushing so that the tissue doesn't die and nothing happens.

If we can learn more about how a tissue is able to survive outside of the organism, maybe we can understand how to preserve it for longer for our benefit.

That was one of our questions.

So we actually added some nutrients in the form of amino acids.

So we added supplemental amounts of that to the water.

And we found that the podia or the tube feet were actually able to take up those nutrients without needing a digestive tract or mouth.

There's a number of different areas of research that will benefit.