481: Hijacker-Host Sequence Swap

This episode: Gene transfers between viruses and eukaryotes have
happened many times throughout evolutionary history!


Download Episode (7.5 MB, 10.9 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Mycoplasma subdolum


News item


Takeaways





As we’ve all seen recently, viruses can cause a lot of
trouble. Their biology requires them to be parasites inside
the cells of their hosts, and they can cause devastating
disease, so it’s hard to think of them as having played
important roles in the development of life on Earth,
including our own evolution.

However, this study found thousands of apparent historical
transfers of genes from virus to host or from host to virus
in the cells of all kinds of different eukaryotes. Some of
these genes play important roles in the cell, helping to
make them what they are.


 
Journal Paper:
Irwin NAT, Pittis AA, Richards TA, Keeling PJ. 2022.
Systematic evaluation of horizontal gene transfer between
eukaryotes and viruses. Nat Microbiol 7:327–336.

 


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dot com. Thanks for listening!


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