The two-thousand-year-old mystery of the havoc-wreaking worm
New research reveals that we know less about the history-altering
shipworm than we thought

Date:
July 13, 2021
Source:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Summary:
Humans have known for over two thousand years that shipworms,
a worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats,
docks, dikes and piers. Yet new research reveals that we still
don't know the most basic thing about them: how they eat.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Humans have known for over two thousand years that shipworms, a
worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats, docks,
dikes and piers.

Yet new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst published
in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that we still don't know the most
basic thing about them: how they eat.


========================================================================== "It's unbelievable," says Reuben Shipway, adjunct assistant professor
in microbiology at UMass Amherst, research fellow at the Centre for
Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and one of the
paper's authors.

"The ancient Greeks wrote about them, Christopher Columbus lost his
fleet due to what he called 'the havoc which the worm had wrought,'
and, today, shipworms cause billions of dollars of damage a year."
Shipworms also play a key role in mangrove forest ecosystems, found
throughout the world's tropical regions, and are responsible for cycling
a huge amount of carbon through the web of life. "Yet," says Shipway,
"we still don't know how they do what they do." Part of the problem is
that the nutritious part of wood -- cellulose -- is encased in a thick
and extremely difficult-to-digest layer of lignin. "Imagine a really
thick, unbreakable eggshell," says senior author and UMass professor of microbiology, Barry Goodell.

Certain fungi possess enzymes capable of digesting the lignin, and it
has long been thought that symbiotic bacteria living in shipworms' gills
also had the enzymes. "We thought that the bacteria were doing the work,"
says Goodell, "but we now know they are not." Researchers are still
trying to figure out what within the shipworm could be responsible for
breaking down the lignin. "I combed through the entire genomes of five different species of shipworm," says Stefanos Stravoravdis, the paper's
lead author and a graduate student in microbiology at UMass, "looking for specific protein groups which create the enzymes that we know are capable
of digesting lignin. My search turned up nothing." This, however, is
not the end of the story, and the team will be publishing more research
in the near future that will help unravel the mystery of how shipworms
eat wood. "We need to understand this process" says Stravoravdis.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_Massachusetts_Amherst. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Stefanos Stravoravdis, J. Reuben Shipway, Barry Goodell. How
Do Shipworms
Eat Wood? Screening Shipworm Gill Symbiont Genomes for
Lignin-Modifying Enzymes. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021; 12 DOI:
10.3389/ fmicb.2021.665001 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713145750.htm

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