Sea urchin’s nervous system can act like a brain, scientists say

In a startling discovery that pushes the boundaries of neurobiology, scientists from the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin have discovered that the common sea urchin has a brain-like nerve system distributed throughout its body rather than concentrated in a single organ. These spiky marine animals, according to researchers, have what is essentially an ‘all-body brain.’

Teams from Berlin, Naples, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and Lyon participated in the international study to find out how sea urchins — which start as bilaterally symmetrical larvae and eventually develop five-fold radial symmetry as adults — manage their drastic body-plan transformation under a single genome.

What they discovered goes well beyond developmental curiosity: adult sea urchins appear to lack a real ‘trunk’ region, with the