Photosynthesizing Sea Slugs Steal Genes From Algae 74
An anonymous reader writes For decades, scientists have puzzled over how a certain sea slug acquires the ability to photosynthesize after ingesting algae. An advanced imaging technique now confirms that the slugs are literally stealing genes from the algae. It's considered the first example of horizontal gene transfer in a multicellular organism.
GMO (Score:5, Funny)
Holy crap, they're GMO! I demand they be labeled as such right now!
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This is not the first example of gene transfer in nature, either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
But it's the latest example we can wave in the Luddites' faces.
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To quote from your link,
Horizontal gene transfer is the primary reason for bacterial antibiotic resistance
So it looks like it is a good comparison, the Luddites were right about industrialization making things worse for them, their children and their grandchildren and now the same can be said about horizontal gene transfer.
Of course the thing with GMO is that it is neutral and can be used for good reasons such as making food more nutritious or bad reasons such as making food keep better even if it means the food is less nutritious or reasons that end up bad like encouraging more pesticid
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> It's considered the first example of horizontal gene transfer in a multicellular organism.
Now that we know horizontal gene transfer happens in nature, that should lay to rest any arguments that GMOs are unsafe, after all it is exactly the same thing just man-made in a lab where it can be tested.
Because transferring food-making genes into an inedible organism is just the same as transferring poison-making genes into your food.
Re:This Proves GMOs are Safe! (Score:4, Insightful)
The Bt gene is a 'poison making gene' in the same sense that grapes are poison berries; just because a thing harms one organism (in the case of Bt, lepidopterans and coleopterans and in the case of grapes dogs) does not mean it hurts you. The Bt toxin is very well understood; to imply it is dangerous to humans is simply dishonest.
Re: This Proves GMOs are Safe! (Score:1)
Mod parent, grandparent and grandgrandparent horizontally.
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Yes, we should trust Monsanto when they say it's safe, just like we trusted the tobacco companies when they debunked the "smoking causes cancer" myths. Oh wait...
Why can't Monsanto open source everything? So we can get many eyes to make the bugs shallow?
Re:This Proves GMOs are Safe! (Score:5, Informative)
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So what you want is for someone else to do all the work then hand it over to you? Stop being a leech and do your own research.
This shit costs money.
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So one is saying trust Monsanto (or Syngenta or Pioneer or any of the other seed companies that always get neglected for some reason). I am, however, saying the evidence is overwhelming that genetically engineered crops are safe and effective (and yes, contrary to the conspiracy theories claiming that Monsanto somehow owns the concept of genetic engineering, this includes research that has nothing to do with corporations) and that genetic engineering has been thoroughly demonstrated to be a useful tool for
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Golden rice is open source and developed in response to a specific humanitarian need, but the lack of any association with Monsanto hasn't stopped the flat-earty lobby from ripping up fields of it out of pure spite.
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but to solve it by increasing the price of the only food they can afford does not exactly solve this problem
That's not at all the point of Golden Rice. It is supposed to act as a way to improve the nutritional quality of rice for those who cannot afford anything else, not be a luxury food.
There are cheaper rice crops with higher yield than Golden rice.
Golden Rice doesn't have a set yield. The idea is to breed it into locally adapted varieties so that they retain virtually all of the same genes, but produce the extra nutrition.
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To solve this problem by adding Vitamine A to the rice is misguided. The diet is still unbalanced, and just adding more and more nutritients to rice will just make the crop yield less in general, being thus more expensive, and people will still be
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Food companies used to use formaldehyde as a preservative. Wasn't it obviously safe and effective, as the research of the day proved? Can you think of any other examples where the research overwhelmingly said something was safe and effective, but it wasn't?
Are you an anti-vaxer? Doesn't the research overwhelmingly show that vaccines are safe and effective? Why doesn't everyone accept that research?
Do you think that the research shows overwhelmingly that global climate change is human-caused? How many disagr
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touche: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
It's not stealing... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe not on slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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But I know many multicellular intelligent organisms that have engaged in horizontal gene transfer. Many of them probably shouldn't have.
Yes, even humans. It may be a little know example of horizontal gene transfer but if you stay vegan for long enough you start to grow grass on your head instead of hair, thus acquiring the ability to photo synthesize.
Ancient News (Score:1)
This has been known for years. I even remember watching a nature doco back in the 90s which went into detail about the creatures.
OMG (Score:3)
The ol' "horizontal gene transfer" (Score:3)
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Giggidy.
That word should appear in more scientific papers than it does.
All your base are belong to us (Score:5, Insightful)
I may be too optimistic but this could become a really nice laboratory tool once the exact mechanism of genetic transfer is known and replicated, gene cloning independent from plasmid or simplified transfection would be very useful for genetic engineering. Imagine easily cultured cells that not only can accept various genetic materials but actively incorporate them into their genome, "gene cloning for dummies" kits for one-step protein expression.
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There's a well documented case of horizontal inter-species gene transfer from a radioactive spider to a human.
Another less known case involves a fly and Jeff Goldblum.
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We have that now. Google CRISPR/Cas9. Like all our cool tools for recombinant DNA, we stole it from existing life forms (bacteria usually).
G.
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More to the point, this gets us one step closer to true gillyweed [wikia.com]
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I can't wait till we can take a pill to do this!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
So if they Ate? (Score:2)
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Nature laughs at your naive realism. The universe is not only stranger than you imagine, but stranger than you can imagine.
Re:So if they Ate? (Score:5, Informative)
It might be pointed out that plants' chloroplasts and our mitochondria are now well-understood to have originated as "ingested" bacteria that, rather than being broken down and digested, ended up first as internal symbionts, and were over time transformed into the cells' internal organs. What these slugs are doing is somewhat similar to this, though on a somewhat smaller scale. The slugs apparently only nab a few chromosomes from the algae, and transfer them into their own digestive-system cells.
But the "first" in the article is a bit different from this: They describe it as the first-known such transfer between two multi-cellular species. Our mitochondria seem to have originated in a single-cell ancestor similar to an amoeba, which incorporated an entire living bacterium as an internal resident. Similarly, plant chloroplasts are believed to have originated as photosynthetic bacteria that were incorporated whole into early algae. In both of these cases, there has been gene transfer from the internal bacteria into the eukaryotic cell's nucleus, leaving the mitochondria and chloroplasts with mostly just the genes needed to do their job, and unable to survive outside their host cell.
But the slugs took a different route, of separating out the photosynthesis genes from their food's cells, moving the DNA into the slugs' cells, and digesting the rest of the algal cells as food.
It could be interesting to stick around and see how this works out. Eventually, they might be able to incorporate the photosynthetic mechanism into their own genome, so that when a slug cell divides, it'll get copies of of these genes and won't have to steal them from algae. Plants never never did this, because they maintained their chloroplasts' ability to divide within the plant cell (with a bit of help from the host cell). The slug's approach might turn out better than the plants'. Or maybe it won't. Or maybe it'll just be two different approaches to photosynthesis that both work well enough.
But we might not know about this for a few more millennia ...
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...originated as "ingested" bacteria that...
This is probably one of the most exciting, new insights we have achieved in recent decades; but aren't there two equally possible routes for this ingestion? One being that a predatorial cell feeding on these cells at some point stopped completely digesting them, the other being that the mitochondria and chloroplasts were once parasites. I'm not sure which one I think is more likely - perhaps I'd go for the parasite scenario, but it could well be that both routes could have been employed, or that the distin
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...originated as "ingested" bacteria that...
This is probably one of the most exciting, new insights we have achieved in recent decades; but aren't there two equally possible routes for this ingestion? One being that a predatorial cell feeding on these cells at some point stopped completely digesting them, the other being that the mitochondria and chloroplasts were once parasites. I'm not sure which one I think is more likely - perhaps I'd go for the parasite scenario, but it could well be that both routes could have been employed, or that the distinction between predation and parasitism isn't all that clear.
Indeed. And we have lots of examples in the modern world where such mixed symbioses are visible. We're part of a lot of them. Consider that many of our domesticated species are far more "successful" than their wild relatives, but their price for teaming up with the world's top predator (us) is that we eat most of them. We let enough of them survive and reproduce that, biologically speaking, it's worth the price.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it does turn out that our mitochondria started off as bot
Not stealing, stole. (Score:5, Informative)
The slugs at some point in their past acquired the genes from algae that are required to maintain/repair the chloroplasts that each one collects from the algae they eat. The horizontal gene transfer is (presumably) not an ongoing process but something that happened in their distant past.
The baby slugs start eating algae and they digest most of them but they save the chloroplasts from the algae cells and integrate them into their own tissue. Once they accumulate enough of them they basically become solar powered and don't need to eat anymore.
Normally the chloroplasts would not survive very long without an algae around them to take care of them, but this is where the genes that the slug has that originally came from the algae come into play. The slug is thus able to provide the things that its adopted chloroplasts need to survive for many months.
Definitely very cool.
G.
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It could turn you blue...never know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
This FIRST example? (Score:2)
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Fuel for skeptics? (Score:1)
A creationist could argue that (apparent) gene transfer means evolution provides no consistent predictions. If things change suddenly or traits hop between category branches, then evolutionists can simply claim "gene transfer". If they change gradually, then they claim traditional natural selection.
Of course there is more to the net evidence, but the prediction-ability argument is weakened by gene hopping since it can be invoked to "explain away" a wide range of different observations.
A natural world that
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The evidence implies that the slugs violate Darwin's laws of Evolution in order to get some advantage in their struggle for survival, but they equally violate the laws that the Creator decreed.
Now imagine all the super power they would get (Score:2)
If only (Score:1)
If only we could make that work for humans.
Oddly enough (Score:2)
I was taught this in my college Marine Biology classes in the late 1980s.
How has it taken this long for it to be discovered again? Were the 1990s the dark ages?
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I believe it is the mechanism they discovered, not that it happened.