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One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's

Posted by Zonk on 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.'"

5 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. scifi tag? by haluness · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:scifi tag? by TheMeuge · · Score: 5, Informative

      The mitochondria have not been incorporated into the human genome. Mitochondria contains its own circular DNA structure, which exists and replicates independently of the genomic DNA. There must have been some gene loss/exchange, however, because many proteins necessary for mitochondrial structure and function are found solely in the genomic DNA.

  2. Round up ready weeds and other horrors. by Erris · · 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.

    --
    DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
  3. Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome by eli+pabst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wolbachia are kind of funky though. They can live inside of host cells (as an intracellular symbiont) which is a bit uncommon for most bacteria. They do weird things like infect female gametes (eggs) and kill male offspring, that way only infect females will be produced. Still doesn't take away from the fact that you have a bacterial genome integrated into it's host. But they're definitely not a run of the mill bacteria.

  4. Re:There are retroviral genomes in ours genome by eiapoce · · Score: 5, Funny

    the Bacteria had done precisely that. Do you think that the retrovirus now could sue for this outstanding patent violation?

    Enrico