Lifeboat Foundation

Bacterial cells can easily share genes with one another, and have a few ways to do so. Viruses called bacteriophages infect bacterial cells, and they can also transfer genes between bacterial cells in a process known as transduction. Often, the genes that are being shared confer resistance to a drug, and once a bacterial cell gains the ability, antibiotic resistance can easily spread through populations of microbial cells. Now scientists have discovered another mechanism that bacteria use to share genes, and it can help microbes evolve even faster than we knew. The findings have been reported in Cell.

There are three types of transduction that we now know about: generalized, specialized, and lateral. The newly revealed mechanism is called lateral cotransduction. It is about as rapid as lateral transduction, which itself is far faster than generalized transduction. However, the study indicated that lateral cotransduction is more complex and versatile than the other modes of transduction. Lateral transduction happens when phages that have integrated into bacterial genomes are reactivated, and trigger reproduction in the lytic cycle; but lateral cotransduction can while new bacterial cells are being infected, and during the reactivation process.

Evolution doesn’t fix things — it reinvents them. A biologist explains.

The Belle II cooperation project at the Japanese research center KEK is helping researchers from all over the world to hunt for new phenomena in particle physics. The international experiment has now reached a major milestone after a team successfully installed a new pixel detector in its final location in Japan.

The size of a soda can, the detector was developed in order to make out the signals coming from certain types of particle decays, that can shed light on the origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry that has been observed in the universe. The installation ran without a hitch and is a key milestone in the evolution of the experiment and German–Japanese research collaboration.

Based at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan’s KEK research center, Belle II is an international collaborative project involving researchers from all over the world. The experiment aims to find answers to the many unresolved questions about the universe that are out there. To this end, the 1,200 or so members of the international Belle II collaboration are searching for signs of new phenomena in physics and unknown particles not covered by the established Standard Model of particle physics.

An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists has discovered a surprising connection between pure mathematics and genetics. This connection sheds light on the structure of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms.

Number theory, the study of the properties of positive integers, is perhaps the purest form of mathematics. At first sight, it may seem far too abstract to apply to the natural world. In fact, the influential American number theorist Leonard Dickson wrote “Thank God that number theory is unsullied by any application.”

And yet, again and again, number theory finds unexpected applications in science and engineering, from leaf angles that (almost) universally follow the Fibonacci sequence, to modern encryption techniques based on factoring prime numbers. Now, researchers have demonstrated an unexpected link between number theory and evolutionary genetics.

Each cell in the body stores its genetic information in DNA in a stable and protected form that is readily accessible for the cell to carry on its activities. Nevertheless, mutations—changes in genetic information—occur throughout the human genome and can have a powerful influence on human health and evolution.

“Our team is interested in a classical question about mutation—why do mutation rates in the genome vary so tremendously from one DNA location to another? We just do not have a clear understanding of why this occurs,” said Dr. Md. Abul Hassan Samee, assistant professor of integrative physiology at Baylor College of Medicine and corresponding author of the work.

Previous studies have shown that the DNA sequences flanking a mutated position—the sequence context—play a strong role in the mutation rate. “But this explanation still leaves unanswered questions,” Samee said. “For example, one type of mutation occurs frequently in a specific sequence context while a different type of mutation occurs infrequently in that same sequence context. So, we think that a different mechanism could explain how mutation rates vary in the genome. We know that each building block or base that makes up a DNA sequence has its own 3D chemical shape. We proposed, therefore, that there is a connection between DNA shape and mutations rates, and this paper shows that our idea was correct.”

Experimental studies of microbial evolution have largely focused on monocultures of model organisms, but most microbes live in communities where interactions with other species may impact rates and modes of evolution. Using the cheese rind model microbial community, we determined how species interactions shape the evolution of the widespread food-and animal-associated bacterium Staphylococcus xylosus. We evolved S. xylosus for 450 generations alone or in co-culture with one of three microbes: the yeast Debaryomyces hansenii, the bacterium Brevibacterium aurantiacum, and the mold Penicillium solitum. We used the frequency of colony morphology mutants (pigment and colony texture phenotypes) and whole-genome sequencing of isolates to quantify phenotypic and genomic evolution. The yeast D. hansenii strongly promoted diversification of S. xylosus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQNyQ7pKPwA

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The astonishing discovery is “important for the understanding of evolutionary processes because generation times could be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages,” according to a study published on Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics.

“Their evolution was literally suspended for 40k years,” wrote Philipp Schiffer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne and a co-author of the study, in an email to Motherboard.

“We are now comparing them to species from the same genus, which my team samples around the world,” he continued, noting that he is currently conducting fieldwork in the Australian Outback. “Studying their genomes we hope to understand a lot about how these populations became different in the last 40k years.”

Opinion Piece. What’s your opinion?

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter has gone through another remarkable evolution thanks to owner Elon Musk. The platform is now called “X” and is even sporting a brand spanking new logo. The blue bird has taken its last flight and the site seems poised to bring its users into the next venture in the Muskverse.

But not everyone has been happy with the changes Musk has made since taking over the company. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently went after Musk for the supposed harassment she receives on the platform. It seems that since the day he bought the social media company, he has been making leftists’ heads explode, and AOC is far from an exception in claiming she “never experienced more harassment on this platform” than she does now. She also claimed people “now pay to give their harassment more visibility.”

Continue reading “Twitter Has Undeniably Gotten Better Under Elon Musk” »