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One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Aug 30, 2007 06:01 PM
from the it's-a-mad-house-a-mad-house dept.
from the it's-a-mad-house-a-mad-house dept.
slyyy writes "The Universtiy of Rochester has discovered the complete genome of a bacterial parasite inside the genome of the host species. This opens the possibility of exchanging DNA between unrelated species and changing our understanding of the evolutionary process. From the article: 'Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms. Bacterial DNA is very conspicuous in its structure, so if scientists sequencing a nematode genome, for example, come across bacterial DNA, they would likely discard it, reasonably assuming that it was merely contamination--perhaps a bit of bacteria in the gut of the animal, or on its skin. But those genes may not be contamination. They may very well be in the host's own genome. This is exactly what happened with the original sequencing of the genome of the anannassae fruitfly--the huge Wolbachia insert was discarded from the final assembly, despite the fact that it is part of the fly's genome.'"
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There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:4, Interesting)
http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017 [genomebiology.com]
Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a bit like the story of the mitochondria [rice.edu]
All your base (pairs) belong to us!
Parent
Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:5, Funny)
Enrico
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
This doesn't do anything to Intelligent Design. No scientific evidence will ever do anything to Intelligent Design, because "God did it" covers a multitude of sins. If Intelligent Design were a scientific theory, then it could be proven wrong by such pedestrian things as "evidence".
mmm... home made mutants! (Score:3, Informative)
i don't care (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:i don't care (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
scifi tag? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:scifi tag? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:scifi tag? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:scifi tag? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:scifi tag? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In fact _most_ of the genes that encode mitochondrial proteins are now in the nucleus, presumably a result of ancient DNA transfer from the primordial mitochondrial genome to the nuclear genome, so the parent post is substantially correct. The modern mitochondrial genome is pretty vestigial (smaller than that of many viruses). The original arti
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:scifi tag? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:scifi tag? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Replic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA#Mi
I don't know what kind of access you have to scientific journals but this abstract has a pretty good description of sperm mitochondria and how they are degraded via ubiquitinylation (a common degradation pathway)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubme
Hope that helps.
Parent
Re:scifi tag? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Mitochondria (Score:4, Insightful)
Round up ready weeds and other horrors. (Score:5, Interesting)
This discovery is unsetling and I hope that it's an error. There's already evidence that pesticide resistance from GM crops has turned up in weeds. Gene swapping in the wild might happen more often than we would like. Some of the unpleasant possibilities include food you can't eat, cotton you can't wear and weeds you can't get rid of.
Re: (Score:2)
oh?
Oh yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Weeds have already been given pesticide resistance through regular polenation [slashdot.org] and natural selection [indybay.org]. This is bad enough because it defeats the purpose and there are plenty of studies that GM crops are harmful to wildlife [commondreams.org], including mysteriously disappearing honey bees.
Newer concerns are better written and documented here by a Monsanto whistle blower [seedsofdeception.com]. We already know that the industry was sloppy because unapproved GM crops have contaminated the US rice supply [washingtonpost.com]. It may be that the people who worried about GM crops were right and evidence of genes crossing species is just one of the many things they feared. Genetic sequencing is new and bound to bring big surprises.
It's good practice to keep an open mind but be careful until you know things are safe. A couple of historical examples show how caution works and what industry does when it's not careful. People who hear about the use of lead and arsenic in paint and wallpaper often wonder how people could be so stupid as to have that kind of thing in their homes. The answer is that printers and painters overstepped their knowledge and embraced new toys that made them money. At the opposite end of the of caution is Rontgen, the discover of Xrays. He was very careful to shield all of his sources with lead bricks because he did not know what his newly created rays would do to him. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not die of cancer. People continued to expose themselves needlessly for half a century before sane practices were finally codified.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Here's the argument from the highly biased source [commondreams.org] you linked to:
Test 1: Spring-sown oilseed rape, October 2003
Nationwide tests found that biotech oilseed rape sown in the spring could be more harmful to many groups of wildlife than their conventional equivalent. There were fewer butterflies among modified crops, due to there being less weeds. Verdict: GM fails.
I'm sorry, but reducing weeds means GM passes, that was it's goal. There's nothing mysterious in observing that
Re: (Score:2)
Wow (Score:4, Funny)
-Peter
Re: (Score:2)
It'd be cool if we could spawn our own bacteria (Score:2, Interesting)
Dawkins (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, according to him, we are machines whose purpose is to allow genes to replicate. The fact that other genes co-opt this mechanism isn't entirely surprising if you look at it from that perspective.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So this sort of dog-eat-dog, inter-species warfare (as well as friendly symbiosis and back-scratching) between genes for th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
--Gospel of Thomas'
Since Thomas didn't write the Gospel of Thomas (and the same is true of all the books in the new testament) what you are really saying is that someone wrote that someone said that someone else said "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man." And lets just i
humility, what's that? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:humility, what's that? (Score:5, Insightful)
And we all know that human beings would be much better off without fire.
Parent
mitochondria, chloroplasts, viral DNA (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
phoenix (Score:5, Informative)
Effect of retrovirus on Human Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this article "retroviruses (ERVs) comprise roughly 5% of the human genome."
(Note that the HTML translation is unclear - open the PDF to see that it says 5%)
http://www.hindawi.com/GetArticle.aspx?doi=10.100
Hard to imagine that viral DNA is 5% of our genome without having any impact..
Actually, it's very easy to imagine (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's very easy to imagine. Transcribing DNA to proteins happens between a START and a STOP marker. If those markers are lost -- heck, even if just the START marker is lost -- then that piece of code is never "executed". In programming terms, it's commented out.
:)
And, yeah, your genetic code contains a whole bunch of commented-out sequences. Dunno, I don't have much trouble believing that they have no impact whatsoever
Benefits for the host? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if this has already happened to humans through generations. In fact, I wonder if this is a standard working component of evolution, where bacteria are a catalyst. It seems that nature always gives us nice surprises to keep us in awe and realizing we don't know anything about biology.
(As a side note, I was suddenly reminded of the Metroid Fusion game, where Samus absorbs the X cores' DNA and incorporates them into her system)
Parasites and host behavior (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Parasites and host behavior (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Doesn't mean two organisms combined (Score:4, Funny)
Mebbe it's just me but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mebbe it's just me but (Score:4, Informative)
Uh huh, and how exactly do you propose to do that? (also, doing this on a human seems like a pretty bold move)
People tend to throw around "junk DNA" without really specifying what they mean. For humans, we know that about 1.5% is coding, about 4% is highly conserved (so, probably very important) and we suspect that a fair amount more is involved in transcription regulation (there's been a lot of activity in that particular area recently), but we have a very faint idea of how much that would be. I saw a talk a few weeks ago where they claimed that nearly all non-coding DNA is involved in this function; that's not a widely held view, though.
It seems likely that since there are so few actual genes and they are so sensitive to mutation, then a highly redundant and more "flexible" mechanism for transcription regulation is one of the primary mechanisms for evolution.
So yeah, I am not sure where the popular perception that non-coding DNA is considered to do nothing comes from.
Oh, and as someone already pointed out, the number of chromosomes a particular organism has is completely meaningless (chickens have 78, some primitive plants have hundreds or even thousands).
Parent
My DNA... (Score:3, Funny)
Evolutionary Tree not a Tree (Score:3, Informative)
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
"You got wolbachia in my fruitfly!"
Wraith? (Score:2, Funny)