Horizontal Gene Transfer

Back in the 1970s, a scientist named Ananda Chakrabarty received the first patent for a genetically modified lifeform, an oil eating "Superbug" from the bacterial strain Pseudomonas putida. The feat was doubly hailed as a major step in bioremediation and a travesty of nature. In the long run, Chakrabarty's Superbug was a failure. It was unable to survive in the wild, unable to compete with native bacteria, and unable to move towards food sources.

i-43ed75ea90268abca7be526cd642b044-john_dennehy.jpg

The moral of the story is that it is very difficult to tinker with nature and produce an organism that can survive outside the rarefied confines of the laboratory. It takes a certain amount of hubris to believe that we can outdo 4 billion years of natural selection.

Genetic engineering? Nature does it all the time. Scientists call it horizontal gene transfer.

i-0c171338fce40cb8ce5b73e2651b71b7-conjugation.jpg

Bacteria can share antibiotic resistance genes. Viruses often encode virulence factors that make bacteria make you sick. Among eukaryotes, examples of horizontal gene transfer are popping up every day among organisms as diverse as plants, nematodes, beetles, and yeast. Even human--gasp--may be riddled with the remnants of horizontal gene transfers: transposons, "jumping genes", retroviruses, B chromosomes, even our organelles.

Engineering life is as old as life itself. We may be the first to do so in a conscious directed manner, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we are the first. There is no doubt there will be mistakes made along the way, but fears of Frankenstein fauna overwhelming nature are vastly overstated. Genetic engineering has already overwhelmingly benefited our lives in ways that most of us are unaware of. Simply put, the benefits have outweighed the costs by several orders of magnitude.

Chakrabarty, A M; Mylroie, J R; Friello, D A & Vacca, J G (1975), "Transformation of Pseudomonas putida and Escherichia coli with plasmid-linked drug-resistance factor DNA.", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 72 (9): 3647-51, 1975 Sep, PMID:1103151

More like this

In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology would lead to bacteria that could eat the oil spilling into the…
The rest of you might be totally lost. Here's a soon-to-be-classic paper on the characterization of the Hoho2 gene (292K pdf)—the Santa phenotype seems to represent an optimization for an arctic niche. They suggest the allele might have had an origin in Neandertal populations, but then they also…
Yesterday, four people emailed me, asking about Brian Palmer's Slate article about antibiotic resistance. Since I'll probably get more such emails (and thank you for sending them), I'll offer my thoughts below: 1) Palmer's basic point about antibiotic development not being the answer is right.…
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” -Marcus Aurelius How old is life on Earth? If all you had to go on was the fossil record, you'd run into severe trouble once you went back more than one or two billion…

A major problem with oil-eating bacteria is that oil is not a complete diet. To use them to clean up an oil spill means providing nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.; whatever is lacking in the oil. Probably do more harm to the ecosystem than the oil spill did.

By Jim Thomerson (not verified) on 12 Jun 2008 #permalink