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One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's
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 multiple retroviral genomes in our own genome. So I am not too surprised.
http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017
This might have an interesting impact on the 10 year forecast to creating artificial life discussion from earlier today.
Walk with Music;
as long as i don't get the genes from my neighbour
First thing that pops in my mind reading this are the Wraith from Stargate Atlantis. (parasites infesting humans and evolving in a human eating monster)
I didn't found something funny to put here.
What's with the scifi tag? This is real stuff, not fiction. And not entirely surprising sicne mitochondria in humans are (hypothesized?) ancient bacteria that have been incorporated into the human genome
Hmm, weren't mitochondria, that occur in all our cells, originally symbiotic bacteria?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I thought I was into some kinky shit, but I never tried to stick my genome into someone.
-Peter
I vaguely remember reading about the human genome being found to contain the genome of viruses that we our bodies had defeated aeons ago, but which had been incorporated into our own genetic code as a result. I can't find the text now, but I'm guessing I read it on Slashdot. It is an intriguing idea - imagine in millenia to come, some gigantic alien species carrying around the human genetic code inside their own bodies :)
Of course I'm being high, here, and talking out of my ass, but it does lend a whole new perspective on our role as a part of the ecosystem, as opposed to separate from it.
expandfairuse.org
Not so surprising if you've read Dawkins (For the non geneticists among us).
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.
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But of course we understand genetics and the dynamics of genome development well enough that it's perfectly reasonable for us to manipulate the genes of our primary food crops and release them into the wild. No problem there.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Oh, come on, you all knew the Furon genome was secreted into the human genome, right? That's why Crypto 137 is wandering around collecting brain stems!
Rodney is that you?
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
I haven't heard of a whole genome being inside another species. Although, the mitochondria (which are small energy producing factories inside most life - including mammals) have their own DNA which is separate from our nuclear DNA. Its DNA sequence resembles the sequence of single-celled organisms, which hints that there was a fusion of two different organisms hundreds of millions of years ago. Additionally, plants have chloroplasts (which do photosynthesis), and these are similar - they appear to have been cyanobacteria (independent organisms) that fused with another organism and became organelles within those cells. There are also bits of viral DNA in our own genome - it apparently fused into our DNA long ago. (In fact, you can trace evolutionary relationships by comparing the sequence and positions of these viral bits of DNA across species. Unsurprisingly, humans and apes share a remarkable number of matching viral DNA chunks.)
roughly 8% of our own species' genome consists of bacterial and viral genetic material. some of the segments are nearly complete with at least one case of a virus being resurected called Phoenix. it seems to be a fairly common process, viruses can lose critical genes while trying to replicate in cells which can leave them unable to reproduce as usual, the genome becomes integrated into our own. there are also cases [herpes for example] which can integrate their genome with ours in certyain cells and effectively become dormant, they start the cycle again when and if certain conditions are met. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/science/07virus. html?ei=5088&en=492dd1d370217836&ex=1320555600&adx nnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1163032655-5n RqAOkgWGeKvh/qQcSYCg
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I was just going to post something along this line. I believe the process is termed endosymbiotic theory.
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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)
It dosen't stop there. Certain parasites are apparently able to change the behavior of their hosts.
Clearly a copy/paste error...
What I first though about when I read this story was.. We should clean the host's genome and then defrag it! We need some ad-aware like tool to clean the genome! :-)
I guess this is a new form of car analogies.
Now what would be really good would be to know if this dna can become a parasite again in any way...
And if so.. what triggers it?!! :P
"This opens our eyes to the possibility of exchanging DNA between unrelated species and changing our understanding of the evolutionary process."
There, fixed that for you. Us finding out about something doesn't mean it didn't exist before we knew, as much as we like to believe.
it just means the FSM reused his code. Doesn't everyone?
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I think it would be interesting to take a person's stem cell and try to remove all the "junk DNA" from the nucleus, then grow the cell thru a few generations (perhaps even to a full clone) and see how different it is from the original person. Very likely a lot of what we think is junk DNA isn't useless after all. Probably the reason we have 46 chromosomes in the first place is that we've been accumulating genetic material from other microbes over the span of millions of years...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Since I'm in the middle of reading this series for the first time, Descolada was the very first thing that came to mind. I know this case isn't like that, but the timing was just too coincidental.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
...how long until we have fruitfly genome in human DNA?
Answer that, André Delambre/Seth Brundle!
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
...was unavailable for comment.
Weeds have already been given pesticide resistance through regular polenation and natural selection. This is bad enough because it defeats the purpose and there are plenty of studies that GM crops are harmful to wildlife, including mysteriously disappearing honey bees.
Newer concerns are better written and documented here by a Monsanto whistle blower. We already know that the industry was sloppy because unapproved GM crops have contaminated the US rice supply. 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.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...include the complete genome for pizza.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
It gets even better when you consider the implications of this in the light of Creationists' "Genesis Kinds" argument. If hybridization is so absolute between radically different species, with bacteria acknowledgedly and fundamentally evolving in 'real time' -- then you put two and two together and you get: "So sorry, you're just plain stupid, Mr. Creation Scientist." I would normally call comments like this 'flamebait' -- but this time I just had to get it out there. lol
This may mean that the idea of the "inheritance tree" needs to be revisited. One speculation for the Cambrian Explosion is that a genetic system evolved that made inter-species gene swapping easier (assisted by microbes and viruses). This could speed up evolution by swapping "good ideas". Species A could steal the eye design of species B, and species B could steal the immune system of species A, etc. But it may make paleontology and fossil evolution interpretation tricky. (As species grew more complicated over time, swapping became more difficult.) Instead of an evo tree in the textbooks, we may start seeing Directed Acyclic Graphs.
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry I disagree, those were based on observations from that time period and as we know now they were not very good ones. I suppose you might be able to say the "science" that was known of the world and universe at time was incorporated, but we've seen beyond that. And why exactly do we need to be told what to believe? As a species we both know a great deal and are learning so much about the universe these day that religious views distract and generally point in the opposite direction. When people allow them self to get past the fear eternal damnation and take information in realistically I'm sure most are able to find a significantly better position of them self with in the universe. God may even be at the end of that tunnel, but that doesn't mean ancient texts hold any value or key to finding that.
... feel strangely compelled to think about my new Inner Lords.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
1. Find an 'embedded' genome
2. Patent the original (and unimportant) organism's genome
3. Sue the sellers of the commercial crop with that embedded genome
4. You know this bit...
Nobody cares if you patent the genome of some boring bacterium, but if that turns out to be a constituent of, say, rice or racehorses, then you have a goldmine!
Well, you'll never know if you don't go looking, now will ya? :)
There are *lots* of checkable features in the Bible; some that come to mind are the dimensions necessary for a sea-going vehicle describing the ark, the command to bury, not leave in the open feces. (Sure, we know now, but when it was written it seemed like a strange request.)
But the Bible isn't a chronology- the big-bang start of this universe doesn't stop to define terms or measure in units...it's meant to explain it in (mostly) general terms to the largest audience, ever...not just college kids at MIT.
And it's not a comprehensive manual, either; don't go looking for the development of animals from bacteria to amoeba, for example- there's no room for 20M+ species in a hand-held book. It has a message to tell, with citations of history and a very loving message- it's not a issue of JAMA. Parts are poetry, parts are written more like the Wall Street Journal, and some use hyperbole like you and I use punctuation.
But there is a mention of the development of plants, talking about mosses, pines, and the other trees (well, fauna) by category. That matches the fossil record.
Much like Shakespeare or Keats, if you pick it up thinking it's a scientific manual and use a literal translation, you're not going to get what you should...see also: Christopher Hitchens who does exactly that.
And the reason we 'must believe'? (Other than a huge field of checkable information we didn't know until recently) because science and Christianity are cooperative efforts- the desire to know "why" drives science, the message "how" is in the Bible.
But there's always money to support/publish/advertise heretics; people who would have you believe the book is a simple collection of quaint fairytales with no reason or rhyme. But that's not the truth; there's more connections and themes in the Bible than anything Shakespeare wrote. Blind faith is dumb. Dangerous, too. There actually are people that believe that the billions of years of planet-spinning and oxygen-trapping all happened in 7, 24-hour days. And that the world is only 6,000 years old.
The 6,000 year thing comes from a priest trying to make sense of Numbers, and determine how many years since Adam. Problem is, while he meant well, his five assumptions, which he listed duly as any scientist would, are all incorrect. But you'd not believe how many people will believe it, anyway, even though this isn't in the scriptures.
If you've had problems with Christianity, and the reply suggests you have, it's most likely with bad Christians, not bad scripture. Ya see, in Christianity, UNLIKE ANYWHERE ELSE MANKIND DOES THINGS people like to protect their 'turf' of understanding. They _want_ to remain true to the word, but often times the follow priests/pastors/Jim Jones who leads them astray without ever asking these people for a head-check.
For example, the entire Left-Behind series is based on Dispensationalist doctrine- the idea that we much move all the Jews back to the land called Isreal, have them conquer the old temple and do sacrifices (as done before Christ) and then 3/4 of them will die. And there will be TWO returns of Christ, not just one, for both people. But God doesn't care- he has one message for all. All are welcomed. He doesn't care if you're slave or free, Greek or Hebrew...those are things *we* as people made up.
This doctrine's wrong. But it's about to get millions killed, as the Arabs want to snuff out Isreal. I don't want'em snuffed out, but maybe moved. Read Leviticus 26; once they're 'vomited out' of the land, others will claim it. The patent on the land was in no way permanent.
And why would you support something that would kill 3/4 of any nation? That's just mean.
Yeah, there's more for you to find in the Bible. And it's YOUR choice to read it, or discard it, at your choosing. But don't quote it, if you don't read it...too many people do that, now.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
> Hard to imagine that viral DNA is 5% of our genome without having any impact Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's why we are immune to those. Or it helps us develop immunity to new viruses, which surely are based on these ancestors. The deeper we delve, the more wonderous it is.
There is little doubt that resistance to roundup is showing up in weeds. It is less likely that it is coming from any kind of gene transfer between crop and weed species than simply from evolved resistance within weed species themselves, due to heavy reliance on roundup. Roundup resistance crop species contribute to this by encouraging more use of Roundup. http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=6820&title=Roundup%20Resistance%20Armors%20W eeds
PERFECT! Yes, thank you for an example of someone reading the Bible for things it's not intended. Things like 'four corners of the Earth' and such are part of the literature. Each and every instance you cite is precisely what I was talking about. Good show!
And taking individual verses out of context is a brilliant example of the work of Christopher Hitchens- take a line from Shakespeare. 'Every cock will crow, every ass will bray, and every dog will have his day." Think *that*'s literal? Think *that* is prophecy? Of course not.
And this is what I'm talking about, when I say that if you've had problems with Christianity, you've had people-problems, not Bible problems. But is that to say the rest of your life involves only trouble-free people? Everyone at work lives in a utopia? Heck, no. They're people like everyone, everywhere else.
Think you can get away from hippocrits? Dig a deep hole, throw yourself in; you'll STILL be in the presence of one hippocrit. We all are. But that doesn't stop you from going to the supermarket....doesn't stop you from going to work, doesn't stop you from anything else- why would it stop you from finding God?
I'm not gonna yell at ya; my responsibility is to speak truth to those seeking...and I'm not gonna push you into anything. You need to find your own way. And good luck with it, aye?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
"Hey, you got fruitfly in my wolbachia"
"You got wolbachia in my fruitfly!"
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
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I remember having read this in "the selfish gene" by Richard Dawkings that was written 30 years ago... whats so great about this? or is it just a prove that it actually works that way?
Horizontal gene transfer is already known:s fer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_tran
That's why I'm not so worried about genetic engineering.
Is this the equivalent of computer virtualization on humans?
Now if only the host genome ran XEN..
gtkaml.org
On a related note, mitochondria and chloroplasts are thought to have been introduced when one cell devoured another, and the two cells formed a symbiotic relationship. Over time, their ability to replicate together became fine-tuned, and the inner cell lost abilities that were no longer necessary. This process is termed serial endosymbiosis.
Wolbachia bacteria DNA in Fruitfly Erm.. it does this.. this is what it does. Could also be related to junk DNA issues. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia EuroBorg "You can be assimilated if you want to."
I like that other labs just throw out this as contamination. This guy looks into it and has a break thru.
That's good science. Like Enstien explaining why those pesky Newtonian equations don't always work.
That DNA is in there because God put it there . It's supposed to be there. It's just coincidental that it resembles bacterial DNA.
See? It's science!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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With the new report that some organisms' genomes exist within others, maybe Wired's article is missing the point - that non-bacterial genomes often encode bacterial proteomes (collections of proteins). Maybe, then, bacterial proteomes decode non-bacterial genomes. That would make them factories for non-bacterial genetic expression.
All that blurs the lines of classification if they ever really existed. Maybe a different classification scheme is in order (pun intended) - one that categorizes primarily according to (inter)action, not morphology.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/10/6 5252/