One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's 224
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.'"
There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:4, Interesting)
http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017 [genomebiology.com]
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.
It'd be cool if we could spawn our own bacteria (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Parasites and host behavior (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:scifi tag? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Parasites and host behavior (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dawkins (Score:3, Interesting)
So this sort of dog-eat-dog, inter-species warfare (as well as friendly symbiosis and back-scratching) between genes for the purpose of gene replication is nothing new or surprising to people familiar with biology, but what is new is the fact that bacteria apparently interact with the DNA of organisms in ways we didn't quite expect. It's just not something most people quite expected
Incidentally, these findings seem to be an additional point of evidence against the common creationist argument that you can't add information to the genome through any known naturalistic mechanism (there is a video out there where Dawkins is supposedly stumped when asked for an example of how this might occur). These findings seem to demonstrate that in addition to other known and speculated mechanisms of genetic change, bacteria can integrate aspects of their genome into that of another organisms. As the article indicates, this may have significant implications for our models of biological evolution. Pretty incredible stuff.