NEWS: Excuse Me Waiter, But There's Something In My DNA

I'm sorry, I stopped at genetically influenced bugs. This means I get to be Spider-Man, right? Right?

Wow, havn't seen that quote on these boards in awhile. Let me add I look forward to toiling in their underground genome mines...

If only evolution could be sped up

All the local drivers appear to be hell-bent on doing just that...

Another interesting thing about this discovery is that it's been seen before, except all the experimenters went "oh damn, I got some Wolbachia contamination in my fruit-fly DNA" and tossed the samples.

I think the hard part of this particular paper was proving beyond a doubt that the samples and laboratory protocol was pristine.

Can somebody cut to the chase? Pig and elephant DNA...might they splice?

Oh, the possibilities.

so cool. what is in there that was trashed?

very well written ,great article

Hmm... does this mean that one day, potentially, specially altered bacteria could be used for gene therapy OR more importantly giving me x-ray vision?

I laughed over this one comment far longer than necessary. For that I apologize.

Very interesting article.

i think that means you get to be fruit-fly man actually..

me? i'm waiting for my very own spider-pig!

That's a possibility, but I don't think that will really be in the works for quite a long time. Currently most work in the gene therapy field is using viruses, which are incredibly simple where as bacteria are quite complex. Keep It Simple, Stupid! I think viruses are still the way to go for gene therapy. That being said... I could be wrong

Here's hoping they come up with some fascinating and ultimately extremely useful medical advances as a result of this.

Actually I hope that about pretty much anything in the biological field.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up, it's been a while since I touched anything to do with biology.

Wasn't something like the the entire premise of all Madeleine L'Engle ever wrote?

I guess the gene therapy guys will have to look carefully at places their engineered viruses might therapise, if the genome they're looking at contains stuff they didn't know was there before.

Is that bad?

As soon as a read the premise of the article, I thought of mitochondria. And then there they were later in the article! Amazing things, mitochondria.

whoa. i just did my final project for my crappy art school biology gen. ed. on the mitochondria thing you mentioned in the article.

Flux thank you for that.

For some reason while reading it I was reminded of Chimeras. Since the DNA of an organism can blend...

whoah, too many thoughts, brain shut down.

So much we don't know because we just throw the research away or think it isn't important or possible. It is always exciting to see what might be around the corner.

It's not a matter of simple/complex; it's a matter of mechanism. Viruses reproduce by actively inserting their DNA in a host's cells, taking it over and forcing the cell to make copies of the virus. Wolbachia (and similar parasites actually categorized as "alive") do not, as a matter of normal function, exchange genetic material with their hosts. Bacterial DNA spliced into a host's genetic code is a much rarer phenomenon. (Although, I guess, not quite as rare as we thought!)