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When Two Bacteria Become One
- anitil 6y agoFor anyone interested in this sort of thing, I would recommend a Youtube channel called 'Journey To The Microcosmos' hosted by Hank Green. This world is so bizarre it defies belief
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoO'Rlly? :) Try this https://www.quantamagazine.org/extra-dna-may-make-unlikely-hybrid-fish-possible-20200805/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/extra-dna-may-make-unlikely-h... “I’m still confused. My jaw is still on the floor,” said Prosanta Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist at Louisiana State University and the curator of fishes at its Museum of Natural Science. “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said. I think this may be the weirder.
- clon 6y agoThanks, I guess. Another pit of awe-inspiring procrastination.
- pvaldes 6y agoTwo species from the same genus meet and a new hybrid species has born. Species split and fuse all the time since the earth is the earth.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThat's not what the article is describing.
- pvaldes 6y agoThe concept of bacterial conjugation is know since 1946 And things can turn much weirder than what the article is showing...
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoInteresting - please continue...
- Angostura 6y agoThis feels very much like a prototypical version of sex with two 'haploid' cells merging to form a 'diploid'. It's not quite clear from the article what happens to these merged cells in the long-run. Do they continue to reproduce, forming effectively a new species of bacterium?
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago"The team found that C. ljungdahlii invades C. acetobutylicum. The two organisms combine cell walls and membranes and exchange proteins and RNA to form hybrid cells, some of which continue to divide and in fact differentiate into the characteristic sporulation program" I read that as saying the new chimera (...?) is viable.
- Angostura 6y agoYes, but it skirts a bit - do the resultant spores produce new members of the combined organism, or do they segregate back into the parent species? It feels like, maybe the latter
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoGiven "and RNA to form hybrid cells" it would be hard to see them unhybridising; would that even be possible once you've mixed up so much? So I read the former where you read the latter, but it needs clarifying doesn't it.
- sradman 6y agoThe paper Interspecies Microbial Fusion and Large-Scale Exchange of Cytoplasmic Proteins and RNA in a Syntrophic Clostridium Coculture [1]: > Here, transmission electron microscopy and electron tomography demonstrated cell wall and membrane fusions between the two organisms, whereby C. ljungdahlii appears to invade C. acetobutylicum pole to pole. Hopefully this gives insight into the mechanism underlying symbiogenesis [2] that influenced the evolution of life. Mitochondria and chloroplasts are the most important examples of symbiogenesis. [1] https://mbio.asm.org/content/11/5/e02030-20 https://mbio.asm.org/content/11/5/e02030-20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis