But new techniques that insert foreign genetic material,
say bacterial genes to produce insecticide in a corn plant, have raised health and environmental concerns.
Not exact matches
Virgin, an immunologist,
said he thinks the new findings will produce a more complicated but also much more insightful picture of how human,
bacterial and viral
genes influence human health.
«There are certain
bacterial genes that are more worrisome than others, that are much harder to treat,» Adalja
said.
Because the prion - forming protein identified in the study normally functions as a regulator of
gene activity, the researchers
say their discovery raises the possibility that when it switches to a prion state, it could alter genetic expression and
bacterial behavior.
«If you think of the conjugative transfer of resistance
genes as
bacterial sex, you have to think of tetracycline as the aphrodisiac,» she
says.
He
says this idea has «very profound» implications for the debate over the origins of
bacterial genes that are present in the human genome but absent in our closest relatives (Science, 8 June, p. 1903): The amount of conjugation Waters detected is «high enough to readily explain» the possible infiltration of
bacterial genesinto our DNA, meaning that conjugation could have happened quickly enough to add
genes only to humans, in the years since they split from the common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees.
Donn
says: «The infected crop plants now carry the
bacterial gene, which deactivates phosphinothricine.
«I have treated colistin - resistant infections,» Ghafur
says, and researchers in India plan to test
bacterial samples for the
gene.
Genes that perform the same role in human cells and in bacterial cells, say, may have a recognizably similar spelling of their DNA letters, reflecting the genes» descent from a common ance
Genes that perform the same role in human cells and in
bacterial cells,
say, may have a recognizably similar spelling of their DNA letters, reflecting the
genes» descent from a common ance
genes» descent from a common ancestor.
«It's possible that
bacterial genes have swept all over the world and replaced everything else that existed, so some of the features of the last common ancestor may have been erased from the face of the planet,» Koonin
said.
They have identified 20 newly discovered
bacterial genes that could be used to develop better tests for detecting the disease earlier and more accurately,
says John Bannantine of the USDA.