LOS ANGELES, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have discovered clues to aging and healing from a squishy sea creature, the agency said on Friday.

The researchers studied how a tiny sea creature regenerates an entire new body from only its mouth. The team sequenced RNA from Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a small, tube-shaped animal that lives on the shells of hermit crabs.

Just as the Hydractinia was beginning to regenerate new bodies, the researchers detected a molecular signature associated with the biological process of aging, also known as senescence.

Hydractinia demonstrates that the fundamental biological processes of healing and aging are intertwined, providing new perspective on how aging evolved, according to the study published in Cell Reports.

"Studies like this that explore the biology of unusual organisms reveal both how universal many biological processes are and how much we have yet to understand about their functions, relationships and evolution," said Charles Rotimi, director of the Intramural Research Program at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the NIH. Enditem

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