[HN Gopher] Electric eel's zap can transfer genes to nearby animals
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Electric eel's zap can transfer genes to nearby animals
Author : geox
Score : 164 points
Date : 2023-12-07 12:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nagoya-u.ac.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nagoya-u.ac.jp)
| karim79 wrote:
| > "I realized that electric eels in the Amazon River could well
| act as a power source, organisms living in the surrounding area
| could act as recipient cells, and environmental DNA fragments
| released into the water would become foreign genes, causing
| genetic recombination in the surrounding organisms because of
| electric discharge."
|
| So if I'm reading this correctly, and Atsuo Lida is correct, then
| lightning zapping a water source which is teaming with life can
| trigger genetic recombination[0], and by extension, possibly
| catalyse evolution (at least sometimes)?
|
| I do love the idea, and am aware that I have no idea what I'm
| talking about here.
|
| [0]
| https://www.palomar.edu/anthro/synthetic/synth_7.htm#:~:text....
| tomohelix wrote:
| Yes! Electroporation is literally just subjecting the cells to
| a strong electrical potential. A lightning can definitely do
| the trick in some conditions. Many cells will die, but it is a
| sacrifice natural selection is willing to make.
|
| Although, this doesn't mean you zapping someone with enough
| lightning and they can become the flash. The electroporation
| process is one way of damaging the cell just enough to make
| them take in foreign DNA. Think of it like poking holes in the
| cell and DNA got in. Whether that DNA get recombined or not
| depends on other processes, which might also get activated as a
| stress response to the damage. But it is entirely random. So
| the DNA coding that specific function/protein must be available
| in the environment first, and the cell must survive the process
| of getting struck by Zeus and be lucky enough to do the
| recombination just right to retain that piece of DNA to produce
| a proper mutant.
|
| Lots of entropy here, like someone said elsewhere. But that is
| life. Do it enough time and maybe something fun come out of it.
| karim79 wrote:
| So then, I suppose, the 'lethal zone' would be heavily
| dependant on the power of the lightning strike, the volume of
| the available body of water, the density of life within the
| water, and probably thousands of other factors.
|
| It would perhaps be much worse for ocean-dwellers than for
| fresh-water life due to the conductivity differences.
|
| I would love to see a computer simulation of this, e.g., for
| each type of aquatic ecosystem, what would be the
| recombination sweet-spot or optimal conditions for genetic
| recombination within a lightning-affected area.
| gumby wrote:
| > A lightning can definitely do the trick in some conditions.
| Many cells will die, but it is a sacrifice natural selection
| is willing to make.
|
| While I agree with Dennett,* I don't think agency is
| correctly ascribed here, unless you can find selection for
| locations of increased lightning incidence(!).
|
| It's more like "any survivors remain subject to natural
| selection, as did those unfortunates that did not survive"
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
| cariaso wrote:
| It's more than natural selection.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroporation enables gene
| transfer.
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, that was the topic of the article. I am just dubious
| that a location that got a lot of lightning could be
| selected for, though lightning is not uniform across the
| globe. But it's a rather crude factor and hard to defend
| against on a micro scale!
| jacquesm wrote:
| In the past there were periods of billions of years at a
| stretch with not much else going on that single celled
| organisms being zapped by lightning. You'd think that in
| those conditions it happened and probably frequently
| enough to make a difference.
|
| For multi-cellular organisms the picture is completely
| different and it likely wouldn't matter nearly as much.
| gumby wrote:
| Let me phrase it a different way: I don't think there are
| any organisms selecting for being genetically modified in
| petri dishes by researchers in research labs. I consider
| the gene transfers by lightning to be the equivalent of
| that.
|
| Unsurprisingly there are organisms that seem to
| preferentially strike (and mutate) in hospitals, but have
| they (yet?) selected for some special preference for,
| say, urban hospitals? I doubt it, though it would be cool
| (and probably frightening) if so. That situation would be
| more likely to evolve than the researcher case.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I feel there is a useful analogy in what happens in toxic
| environments. In areas where there are high levels of
| arsenic, for example, you find a limited ecology of
| organisms adapted to tolerate it, and I think I am right
| to say that they do not do well outside of this
| environment, as the mechanisms of tolerance are sub-
| optimal where they are not needed.
|
| The most relevant situation would be where the
| environmental toxin is mutagenic. My uninformed guess is
| that adaptation to that environment would typically
| involve mechanisms to _reduce_ susceptibility to the
| toxin 's mutagenic effect, and, as in the case with other
| toxins, organisms so adapted would be out-competed in
| areas where the toxin is not present.
|
| I guess we have examples in the microbes which have
| adapted to live in areas of high radiation, but I do not
| know how they fare elsewhere.
|
| Update: D. radiodurans is an example, but it has been
| suggested that its tolerance is simply a side effect of a
| mechanism for dealing with prolonged cellular desiccation
| - another sort of environment where they do well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans#Evo
| lut...
| maxerickson wrote:
| There were no organisms selecting to reproduce either. Of
| course, natural selection is largely a random process
| that organisms are subject to rather than a process that
| requires them to be active agents.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's cause and effect reversed! Organisms don't select,
| it's selection pressure that determines which organisms
| get to the age of reproduction and whose offspring are
| viable. Some outside factor (environment, another
| organism) needs to supply the pressure. Absent pressure
| life will occupy whatever room you give it until it runs
| up against some kind of boundary and then that pressure
| will take over again.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| Behold: https://phys.org/news/2021-09-lake-maracaibo-
| lightning-capit...
|
| It's also worth noting that early in earth's history, it
| was geologically very active and thus resulted atmosphere
| with all kinds of extreme weather--including lightning
| storms.
|
| I don't know how likely spontaneous recombination is, but
| those two data points make it seem plausible enough that
| electricity may have had an important role in the
| development of life on earth.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > ...though lightning is not uniform across the globe.
|
| If there is a natural laboratory for this, this would be
| it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
| tomohelix wrote:
| It was a (dumb) joke. The phrase I used came from Shrek.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/some-of-you-may-die
|
| But, to nitpicking, I guess you could say the selection
| came after the gene got recombined. Surviving the zap and
| was lucky enough to do the recombination still do nothing.
| The effect of the recombination, i.e. the expression of the
| foreign gene, is the interesting part. If it confers an
| advantageous trait to the mutant, that mutant get selected
| for in the game of life. If it doesn't, which is most often
| the case, it is selected against, and would be quickly
| removed from the genetic pool.
|
| We do this selection quite often in the lab so perhaps it
| unconsciously leaked out in my phrasing.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The entire early earth was bombarded by lightening on an
| almost constant basis due to a number of factors.
| klyrs wrote:
| Proper mutant, hell. Mama's gettin' chloroplasts. Just... zap
| me up in a vat of algae.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... I know it's a joke, but just to point, chloroplasts
| aren't expressed by genes.
| klyrs wrote:
| sigh... I know, I know.
| dpflan wrote:
| As another pointed out, isn't this early experiment highly
| relevant to the discussion?
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Up until recently this was state of the art (or, spraying DNA
| really hard onto cells, or putting cells in a DNA-laced salty
| spike trap). All pretty barbaric methods really, and still
| widely used.
|
| The fewer cells comprising the organism/thing the more likely
| it is to have any likelihood of a meaningful result. Which is
| not much at best because like the most fundamental capability
| of a living cell/organism is keeping out foreign DNA and not
| integrating and reproducing it if some does get in. So the
| approach is to do it on a _massive_ scale and design in some
| easy way of recognizing /selecting for the successful ones i.e.
| if it happens in nature it's vanishingly unlikely that the
| zapped genotype lasts for more then a generation, just like
| with any other random mutation.
|
| The likelihood of a zapped-in chunk being a major evolutionary
| advantage could be higher than that caused by an environmental
| factor, just because it can transfer big chunks of something
| that was once useful to someone else, versus the more point ish
| mutations caused by radiation etc.
|
| In relation to the eels/lightning, the mechanism is totally
| plausible but the question should be more how meaningful is it
| in comparison to all the other ways DNA is transferred like
| viruses/bacteria/fungus, radiation, bad luck, etc. Generally
| other unicellular critters are somewhat better at sneaking in
| weird DNA than environmental factors because it's their trained
| profession or something
| yieldcrv wrote:
| That's quite a lot of entropy and enough to compete with or at
| least alongside natural selection in that biome.
|
| I wonder if there are other sources that promote recombination in
| nature.
|
| Really messes up the whole model for that theory. Instead of
| assuming transitional forms or so many ancestors passing sex
| linked traits that were selected for, there really can be
| spontaneous same generation mutation that can become sex linked
| or be passed, with no gradual multigenerational aspect.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Viral infection is an example of another example of horizontal
| gene transfer. Some bacteria have developed other ways to take
| advantage of this process easily. Darwin might be surprised by
| this, but the experiments that first showed evidence for this
| are nearly a century old now so its nothing new for the field
| today.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
| dexwiz wrote:
| Some bacteria are capable of naturally taking up genetics of
| nearby bacteria. There are other methods for horizontal gene
| transference. It happens more in simple organisms, but even
| humans are thought to have DNA in a genome transferred by
| ancient viruses.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(genetics)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
| mromanuk wrote:
| Do they evolved to do that? If that's the case, what's the use
| case? If not, it's just a weird artifact of producing
| electricity?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its a byproduct of the electricity. No use case. Authors were
| turned on to try it because this is already a lab technique in
| a much more controlled manner to get some nucleic acids into
| some cell. They wanted to see if there is an example of this in
| nature and the electric eel seemed like a good potential source
| of the electricity.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Right. There is no genetic advantage for the electric eel to
| inject its DNA into others per se.
| mkl wrote:
| It's not (usually) the eel's DNA that gets injected, it's
| just whatever is floating near the victim's cells.
| pugworthy wrote:
| (Im)precisely. As it were.
|
| A lot more likely to do odd things to bacteria and other
| simple organisms in the water than say local fish. Not to
| mention all the biota that's probably growing in and
| around the eel itself. Do they have gut bacteria for
| example? If so what's it do to them?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Eel is just providing the shock not the DNA. There is an
| advantage on the otherhand for species to be susceptible to
| this sort of horizontal gene transfer. E.g. bacteria
| populations will uptake environmental dna like this on the
| offchance they take up something beneficial (usually from
| other bacteria populations in the area that might have
| genes giving an advantage in that environment).
| pugworthy wrote:
| I guess I'm not being precise in my comments. 100% I am
| agreed the eel's DNA is not part of the equation here.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| What's the use case for anything really ?
| omeid2 wrote:
| Propagation is the name of the game, and perhaps the
| ultimate measuring stick for "useful" and so use cases.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Propagation to what end?
| pugworthy wrote:
| As a backdrop for reading this, electroporation is one type of
| transfection, which is a method to "artificially introducing
| nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) into cells, utilizing means other than
| viral infection."
|
| You can also basically squeeze cells to do this, as well as put
| them under higher hydrostatic pressure.
|
| I also think I know the internal project name for something...
| staticautomatic wrote:
| You can use chemicals too.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Is there some state of the art Handbook (Springer
| Taylor&Francis type) that you could recommend on physical
| methods of Transfection that goes into the physics of it?
| flobosg wrote:
| Transfection by heat shock is also a possibility. Anything that
| creates transient pores on the cell membrane should work, at
| least in theory.
| twic wrote:
| Perhaps the most brutal way of introducing nucleic acids into
| cells is microinjection: you make a really, really fine needle,
| jab it into a cell's nucleus, and inject a DNA solution. It is
| incredibly painstaking work, does kill a lot of the cells, and
| making the needles is a black art, but it works for all sorts
| of cells, even those resistant to chemical methods, so it is
| sometimes still useful.
| patcon wrote:
| While mostly used for plants, there's another method that's
| essentially shooting cells with bullets coated in genes
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun
| ospray wrote:
| This feels like the plot of a superhero movie.
| ChintanGhate wrote:
| Origin story of Electro from Spiderman just made a jump from
| fantasy to science-fiction!
| soundarana wrote:
| This mechanism (electroporation) is one of the first steps in
| mass-producing the mRNA vaccine.
| pugworthy wrote:
| So, what is the impact of lightning I wonder? If it hits a tree,
| there's a lot of bacterial and other things in the mix - far more
| than just the tree.
| pugworthy wrote:
| "Lightning-triggered electroporation and electrofusion as
| possible contributors to natural horizontal gene transfer"
|
| https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S15710645130005...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| We need more of this sort of science, trying out weird ideas just
| because. A lot of hypotheses will be dead ends, but surprising
| discoveries more than make up for it.
| wigster wrote:
| i wonder is there more measurable evolution/diversity within the
| vicinity of e-eel habitats? or cancers?
|
| NB. i too know not one jot of which i speak
| linguistics__ wrote:
| To answer that there are two main factors: 1) For this kind of
| single instance gene transfer to have an evolutionary effect,
| it will need to happens to germ-line cell (so an egg or sperm
| cell in a multi-cellular organism, or in a single-celled
| organism). Otherwise the mutation won't be inheritable and it
| won't be evolution, just mutation.
|
| 2) The organism(s) affected by this gene transfer would need to
| be under some evolutionary pressure that would benefit from
| extra genetic variance. Genetic variance in itself is not a
| driver of evolution, evolutionary pressure is, which does need
| the variance to actually do anything. Pressure is the sculptor
| and variance is the clay, without one of those there won't be a
| statue.
|
| Also, normally most random mutations are either negative or
| neutral (there's a lot more ways an organism can be dead than
| alive), so I would suspect this might also be true of gene
| transfers. Though gene transfers from environmental DNA isn't
| as random as direct genetic mutation, so perhaps there's
| something interesting happening there. But I wouldn't be
| surprised to find out that the risk of cancer or viral
| infections would be higher.
| gandalfthepink wrote:
| Warning: Dark Humour
|
| Japanese experiments are always on another level.
| scns wrote:
| Reminds me of the Miller Urey Experiment:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| > I realized that electric eels in the Amazon River could well
| act as a power source...
|
| Somewhere, someone is already thinking about mining crypto with
| these creatures.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Turns out it's you!
| oniony wrote:
| So Mary Shelley wasn't too far off.
| bayouborne wrote:
| "I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might
| infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my
| feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered
| dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out,
| when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the
| dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a
| convulsive motion agitated its limbs." (Chapter 5)
| hhsectech wrote:
| Cool, so Blanka from Street Fighter is plausible, its not just
| made up fantasy bullshit.
|
| Good to know.
| martzy13 wrote:
| This reminds me of a fascinating book I read a few years ago
| about experiments using electricity to promote cellular healing
| and regeneration.
|
| It was called The Body Electric.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Electromagnetism-Founda...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Title says "genetic material". Is not the same as gene
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