Among the animals that are appealing “cover models” for
scientific journals, lancelets don’t spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless,
primitive blobs that look pretty much the same end to end, lancelets “are
extremely boring. I wouldn’t recommend them for a home aquarium,” says Enrico
Nasi, adjunct senior scientist in the MBL’s Cellular Dynamics Program. Yet Nasi
and his collaborators managed to land a lancelet on the cover of The Journal of
Neuroscience last December. These simple chordates, they discovered, offer
insight into our own biological clocks.