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. Other interesting stories: Building a device that translates signals from one microbe to communicate with another Cloaking antitumor bacteria to fight cancer without immune system interference Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot com . Thanks for listening!

You can listen to 481: Hijacker-Host Sequence Swap online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

481: Hijacker-Host Sequence Swap is an episode from BacterioFiles by Jesse Noar.

This episode is 10:55 long.

This episode was published on Aug 21, 2023.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from BacterioFiles when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.