First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified
nature.com
nature.com
This is what the molecular apparatus looks like from the surface membrain of a bacterium.
And it is between cell's type that are vastly different, one relying on photosynthesis, the other uses cell respiration. I am wrong?
Similarly, humans are quite different from whiteflies, although the difference is put into perspective when you consider that we have something like 40% commonality of genes, depending on how you map homologues.
How the plant gene got into the whitefly is a deep mystery that happened long ago.
If we go back even further in evolutionary history, insects, humans and other eukaryotes are descended from prokaryotes. The organelles of eukaryotic cells such as the mitochondria of animal cells and the chloroplasts of plant cells were once individual prokaryotes which merged into colonies and formed eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.
Even today, eukaryotes live symbiotically with prokaryotes in a way that is impossible to disaggregate. You have as many prokaryotic cells living inside of your shirt and pants as you do eukaryotic cells, with trillions of gut bacteria responsible for keeping you alive by pre-processing the food you buy from the supermarket and restaurants into nutrients and amino acids that your actual body can utilise.
Whiteflies also have parasitic and symbiotic commensal bacteria that are integral parts of their organism. Perhaps one of those gut bacteria, or a respiratory parasite transferred that plant gene millions of years ago in a freak occurrence. Or maybe it happens regularly and systemically.
With gene sequencing only becoming widely available in the last decade, scientists are just beginning to isolate and identify examples of gene transfer like the one in this article.
Don’t forget mitochondria, the cellular organelles that are responsible for cell respiration:
> Mitochondria and chloroplasts likely evolved from engulfed prokaryotes that once lived as independent organisms. At some point, a eukaryotic cell engulfed an aerobic prokaryote, which then formed an endosymbiotic relationship with the host eukaryote, gradually developing into a mitochondrion.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/content/the-origin-of-mitoch...
The bacterial residents of mealybug have lost the ability to make crucial proteins, and instead rely on the mealybug to produce them. It never had those genes in the first place, obtaining them instead through HGT. It's thus posited that eukaryotic organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts transferred genes to their hosts as well.[0]
[0]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cell-bacteria-mergers-offer-c...
An awful lot of money is going to be made.
But let's skip the part where hosts are infected by engineered viruses.
Honestly aside from crispr not much has changed since 10 years ago (and I know this is sacrilege on hn but crispr is not that exciting outside of making some lab techiques easier and maybe enabling human germline editing, which it sees no one does).
As to your first point- we are nowhere close to a complete evolutionary tree of life (assuming we could come up with what "complete" means). I agree we have good estimations of some basic major splits, but many things are in flux. Early origins? "Kingdom" classifications change multiple times each year still.
Your second point (aside from "people are dumb", which doesn't really hold) is not about evolution, and I'm not experienced enough to make a judgement. I strongly doubt, however, that the full capacity of "compute" you need to actually do genomics, is anywhere near enough to answer everything we'd want to. Today you need a full team of support, not just one person with grounded first principles (which I agree is often missing, but it's also required of more than one expert type).
For many things you probably need to only do a blast search. for example, I identified candidate mutations in an enzyme one combination of which dramatically improved the output by carefully doing a blast search. Likewise, my postdoc boss basically figured out an entire small molecule biosynthetic pathway with ~ a day's worth of blast searching.
To understand transcriptional networks, you can get really far with qpcr, or if you want to get really old school yeast-two-hybrid, both of these impossible without genomics.
We have total organism knockout Libraries in yeast and e coli that are powerful tools, and have a genome that we've minimized to sub-500 genes. Yes there's 100 or so that we don't understand (mostly short transmembrane proteins that honestly probably need to be there in bulk just to maintain tonicity). These are just the projects I've directly worked on or been a fly-on-the-wall on.
Anyways, point is most of the really bid things that the genomics revolutionized have been ticked off. There's still a lot to do, obviously, but I think we know more than you're giving credit for. It does nobody a service to treat biology as a mysterious black box that will never be penetrated.
And other like pig and monkey resulted from same technique.
The covid vaccines are an example.
Unfortunately, Spore treats evolution as largely cosmetic.
So the most parsimonious explanation is that the gene is horizontally transferred from plants to insects. The chance that it has evolved independently from another insect gene is very, very low.
If you mean insects that look like plants, then no. The genes that control and influence morphology are completely different (in theory a gene for something like a pigment could transfer, but I'm not aware of any examples).
But if you mean insects that, for example, smell/taste like plants (either to plants being eaten, or to other insects), then maybe. But a common strategy that achieves this is for the insect to just store whatever compounds they need from plant material they eat, and that doesn't require gene transfer.
Just don't tell the 'scientists', you will undermine their scriptures now we've gone with a rote learning political science model.
Is this where crispr came from?
Hardly. Horizontal Gene Transfer is an important mechanism, especially for bacteria, but only adds an interesting wrinkle to the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis (which has been incorporating additional aspects from various subfields of biology episodically since it was first articulated):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_centu...
But how the whitefly managed to swipe a plant gene is unclear. One possibility, says Turlings, is that a virus served as an intermediate, shuttling genetic material from a plant into the whitefly genome.
> This study suggests that's not the only way these genetic changes happen
The study says nothing about the transfer mechanism, only that it took place.
That's really just a failure of imagination. Also, it ignores that the mechanisms of evolution have themselves evolved.
Sure, evolution seems unlikely if you assume discrete genes have to change in lockstep to adjust traits successfully (eg. if you assume that separate changes are needed to adjust bones, muscles, skin, nerves, etc. to lengthen a limb), but that isn't how our bodies wirk (if it was, it would be nearly impossible to heal from an injury), nor is it how genes control that development.
Instead, you have genes that control things in less direct ways, such as body to limb ratio, and other genes that direct development of things like muscles in relation to bones and joints don't have to change at the same time for everything to keep working.
Even that's an overly simplified model, but you should get the general idea. You might like to read the book "The Plausibility of Life", which goes into more detail.
From an evolutionary perspective, there are none. Both are but sources of variation (the actual cause does not matter) in the genome; which, depending on their impact, may or may not get fixated by natural selection.
The viral genes we have in our genome were acquired by chance.
This was a fluke that got amplified.
Evolution is hill climbing, but the gene introduction was random. Just as mutations themselves are.
To clarify for others: random gene mutation within an organism is not the same a random gene introduction from external source.
Take something like an Orchid Praying Mantis. If it were discovered that the Orchid Praying Mantis got some of its coloring from a gene transfer of orchid plants with which it cohabitated, that would remove an enormous amount of random mutations that needed to have occurred within its own genome to achieve that goal.
Nobody is saying that the mantis wouldn't be subject to all of the same forces of natural selection thereafter, or that the particular gene that was transferred wasn't itself a random selection from the orchid. It just makes the arrival at certain gene configurations immeasurably more likely than they would've been within the same time period, given an organism's lineage had only had its own random mutations available.
Horizontal gene transfer was actually discovered before we had any consensus that DNA was the biological mechanism of heredity, and the experiments showing evidence of HGT were used as evidence for that claim.
There is simply natural events or circumstance incidentally causing the death of individuals in environments for which they are unsuited before reproduction.