Grand Theft Genome: Genestealers in the Wild

When it comes to gene transfer, most organisms -- yourself included -- play by the rules and stick to sexual and/or asexual reproduction. But then there are the genestealers, organisms that just take the genes they want from other species. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the mind-bending world of horizontal gene transfer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
works dot com. Hey you welcot to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Land and I'm Jay mcswoman.
And before we get going here, just a couple of
things I want to throw out. First of all, Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership.
That's where you need to go if you want to

(00:23):
check out all all of our podcast episodes, videos, blog
post links out to social media accounts, including the landing
page for this episode, which will be sure to fill
up with links to related content, as well as some
key outside sources. At the time of recording this our
our other co host, Christian just put up a wonderful
gallery about in d m A. That's right, tying into

(00:44):
previous two parter we did on in d m A
Slash Ecstasy and number two. You want to help out
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in our favor and help the show continue on as

(01:07):
it has been all right, Robert, I noticed something about you.
What's that, Joe? I notice you have blonde hair. I do.
I do naturally occurring blonde hair naturally, So you don't die, No,
it just it just grows out of my my head
this way. And you weren't struck by lightning or affected
in some way by a god. No, no, I didn't

(01:28):
witness any kind of pan dimensional being and have my
my hair changed color as as is want to happen. Okay,
So one can assume that you get your blonde hair
from your jeans. Yes, so you inherited it from your parents, right,
that's right, nice and nice and vertical. And there's nowhere
else you could have gotten it from, right, Well, unless

(01:49):
I happen to have a run in with a gene steeler. Now,
what is a gene stealer, Robert, Well, a Jane Steeler.
This is uh, you know, in this episode we're gonna
be talking about horizontal gene transfer, which is a very
real thing. But my first exposure to this this topic
really came in the form of tabletop gaming science fiction,

(02:10):
specifically the war Hammer forty thousand Universe. Hold on, I'm
putting on my seatbelt. Okay, Robert Warhammer, Yes, tell me, okay,
just without getting just two geeky about it all. And
I know some of our listeners are are certainly fans,
if if not of the tabletop game, then some of
the video games and that have spun out of it

(02:30):
and the overall world, the sort of expanded universe of
it all. But yeah, this is a tabletop board game
in which far future fantasy armies battled each other. It's
it's started out in the UK. Is this kind of
just sci fi upgrade of an existing fantasy world that
itself was kind of an amalgam of different elements, you know,

(02:50):
Tolkien and Dungeons and dragons and all these the Barians
and the Barbarian for sure, all of it, you know,
wrapped up into one. And then they took it, they
put it in the far future, and then other things,
I mints begin to spill into it. So it's kind
of a beautiful genre, Mutt. Yeah, you know, they ended
up borrowing a little bit here, a little bit here,
and and so if you look at Warhammer forty thousand

(03:10):
as a as a universe, you can definitely see bits
and pieces of everything else. A little aliens, a little
hell raiser here and there, then Horizon, uh, you name it.
It's probably has wormed its way in there at some point,
or another terminator certainly, But but it still feels very
unique and exciting, and I've always been a fan of it. Well,
we all love space monsters here, and I get that

(03:33):
you're heading towards a particular space monster. Yes, the tyrannid
gene Steeler. This is an influence infiltration branch of an
all consuming hive mind from another galaxy. Uh. And the
way that this plays out in the game world, um,
is that the tyranted hive fleet is headed towards our galaxy,

(03:54):
our future scenario, so it deploys this gene Steeler species
ahead of time to a chosen plant it And so
these genes dealers are big, hulking, six lenned killers. Uh.
They're deadly in a stand up fight. But their ultimate
aim is to infect members of the planet's intelligent population
with their own genetic material. These a and an ovipositor

(04:14):
like tongue. The injected tiny embryonic mass into the host organism.
And this uh, this seed is largely inert, but it
carries out three primary functions. Okay, so it's it uh,
psychically enslaves the host mind to a localized version of
the tyrand hive mind. Okay, so it's like one of
those brain stealing funguses, yeah yeah, or any of these

(04:36):
various parasitic wasp interactions with a host. You know. It's
so it's it enslaves the host mind. Then it alters
the host DNA, causing it to pass on hybrid genestealer
genetics to its offspring while also infecting it's made. Oh
that's interesting. So the person that it's infecting isn't just
a host, Like, it doesn't implant an embryo in the

(04:57):
body to you know, develop there and then eventually burst
out with lots of great joy and celebration, but it
puts its genes into your genome, right yeah. And then
after that it alters the host behavior more, forcing them
to care for this monstrous hybrid that's born. And then
the monstrous hybrid and everyone else in this sort of

(05:19):
growing genesteal or family continues to carry out the will
of the high mind, undermining defenses on the planet, producing
less monstrous host from generation to generation until they just
blend in perfectly and uh, and and until they're in
the in the position to just unstabilize the planet enough
for the full blown invasion to hit. I'm reminded of

(05:41):
Patrick McGoohan and Braveheart. When he's speaking of the people
of Scotland he says something like, if we can't get
them out, we'll read them out. Does his creepy mustache twirling, Yeah,
yeah he would. Uh. That's pretty much the tyrant approach here.
So it's I'm going to take control of your genome
by putting my own genes in. Yeah, that's pretty terrific.

(06:02):
Now we have to say, as a side note that Robert,
you showed me a trailer to some non existent movie
that looked like it looked like VHS Platinum. Oh yeah,
I love this. What what was the deal with this thing?
So there's there's as so far, there has not been
an official Warhammer forty thousand Gene Steeler movieum, but there

(06:23):
have been some fan trailers over the years, and there's
a If you go to a stuff abou your mind
dot com, if you just type in gene Stealer one
word into the search bar, you'll find a couple of
posts in which I've embedded this, but yeah, some fans
of forty K made a trailer, a fan trailer for
a non existent fan film about space marines battling to here,

(06:45):
and it's basically the Space Hulk board game scenario and
it's oh, it's just it's delightful. It looks like one
of those via one of those grimy, grainy, low grade
VHS movies you'd get from the eighties that had you know,
cyborg sen It. Like I think I've mentioned these before,
they all came out after Terminator. It's like once Terminator
was out, bam, people knew what to do with their

(07:07):
with their small budget for movie making. Yeah, just barging
it up out there and all these you know, just
throw up, throw some sort of a camera lens over
your left eye and go at exactly, tape some electronics
to your body and and you are borg grime to infinity. Also,
I noticed some of the costumes and this thing kind
of looked like members of Guar. Yeah, and I does

(07:30):
Warhammer did that inspire Guar? I don't know enough about
Goar to comment on that, but I mean Gore has that.
They certainly have those like giant shoulder pad. It kind
of sent the thing going on spikes that they do
remind either they were influenced by some of the space
ort designs, especially in Warhammer, or it was the other way,

(07:51):
or maybe it's a little bit of transfer back and forth. Okay,
a little lateral transfer. Yeah, I definitely get a Warhammer
since from looking at guar on stage. Okay, Well, sticking
with sci fi for just a minute before we get
to the actual science. When I think about the idea
of genes stealing in an alien species, I my brain

(08:11):
obviously goes to one of my favorites, which is the
alien universe, the xenomorphs of of alien aliens, Alien three,
and the others I don't pay attention to, which I
should add was definitely an influence on the creation of
the gene stealers in Warhammer. Yeah, uh I, I can
certainly see how that would be based on what you've described,
because I am reminded of the alien life cycle. So, so,

(08:34):
what happens in the life cycle of a xeno more
if it's kind of like insects we know here on Earth,
sort of sort of, but with some kind of fantastical
elements put in. But so you've got a queen that
lays an egg. The egg hatches, and out of the
egg comes a little scuttling creature called a face hugger.
And this is a parasite that finds a host and
attaches itself to the host's face and then plants the

(08:58):
seed of a larval organism inside the host. So grabs
your face. It's sort of squirts eggs in your mouth
and then down in your torso the larval organism grows.
This is known as a chest burster because it pops
out of your chest when in the most famous scene
from the first movie. But it also seems to, at

(09:21):
least according to definitely by the third movie, this is
clear that it incorporates significant portions of the host animals genome,
or at least its hereditary traits, which would have to
pretty much come from its genome as far as we
know um. And so the chest burster emerges from the
host and it carries phenotypic traits of the host organism. So,

(09:42):
for example, a chessburster that comes out of an adult
human is bipedal, but an alien that pops out of
a dog or another four legged animals strides on all fours.
And this is the example we see in the third
Alien film, right, So it's it's obviously getting something from
its host. It's not just uh, it's not just dwelling

(10:03):
in the host, but it's learning something about body plans
and behavior from the host organism. And that's kind of interesting. Yeah,
I mean in the sort of the alien world, depending
on you know, what origin story, origin theory you want
to go with, Like, this thing is either evolved or
designed to just wipe out a planet's native population, and

(10:27):
so it would make sense that it then steals from
the most successful um creatures on that planet. Exactly what
better way to adapt to any native ecosystem than to
steal the traits of the thing that already survives there.
So any anyway, I think that's a really clever feature

(10:47):
of the Alien universe design, and I've always kind of
liked that. But here's where we get to the real science.
Because if we're talking about organisms getting traits from other organisms, typically,
how does that occur in nature? The obvious answer, the
one everybody already knows, and the thing that's been talked
about and understood in biology for for decades now, more

(11:11):
than decades again, going back for a long time, we've
we've understood the general principle of vertical gene transfer, even
before we understood what role DNA played in in the
transmission of genes and exactly how Even before men daily
in genetics, we had a basic idea that you can
inherit traits from your parents. Yeah, so this is sexual

(11:34):
and asexual reproduction. Yeah, whichever brand of reproduction you prefer
or practice. We're talking again about vertical gene transfer. Up
and down. Think of a family tree, right, go, it
goes down, It doesn't go sideways, it doesn't go up,
it goes down. Um and uh, you know again, a

(11:54):
biological parent passes its genes onto its biological offspring. In
the case of sexual ref deduction, two sets of conspecific
genes merged. And in the case of a sexual reproduction, uh,
you know, you basically have kind of a cloning scenario. One.
They rely entirely on mutation for variation in their DNA,
so there's very little, uh, differentiation in the offspring. Now,

(12:17):
many organisms also engage in both. It's worth saying you
do have some very you know, very strictly a sexual
creatures out there. You have some strictly sexual creatures, But
then you have some that engage in both depending on
what the the reproductive climate happens. To be sure, Like,
you might have a plant that can produce uh spores,
but then I also do UH do pollination, you know,

(12:39):
reproduction like the hydra as I remember as an example
of this, not the mythical hydro, but of course the
the real natural world. Hydra can reproduce a sexually by budding,
or it can produce reproduce sexually, depending on what it
has at its disposal. Wouldn't it be great if we
had that option? Would be so strange to live in

(12:59):
a world humans. So you can reproduce sexually if you
want to maybe gain some resistance to parasites and and
strengthen your genome by recombination with another, you can sexually reproduce.
But if you're in a pinch and you need to
have kids and and a healthy made is not available,
you just clone yourself. Yeah, I think that's where we

(13:19):
may be going, you know. And uh and it's I
think it's not going to be that weird of a
thing when it becomes a regular, viable, everyday option for
personal reproduction. Well, that probably deserves an episode of its
own sometime in the future certainly. Yet even this near
future cloning scenario we're talking about, this is still vertical
gene transfer. It's still parent to child, parent to offspring,

(13:41):
exactly right. And so this has led us to develop
a sort of loose model of evolution of life on
Earth that's referred to usually as the tree of life.
This is evolution as Darwin imagined it in uh in
on the Origin of Species. Now, the subject of today's
episode is going to complicate the applicability of this model,
but we'll get to that in a minute. So what

(14:03):
is the tree of life? The tree of life says
parent organisms pass their genes on to offspring, So you
have to imagine sort of an arrow starting at the
top of a page and traveling down and throughout the process.
Variation is introduced through independent mutation. So there's an error
in copying of DNA and a random change is introduced

(14:25):
for good or for ill, and then through natural selection
uh the advantageous changes are preserved and the ill changes
are erased. And so eventually, over time enough mutations into
the gene pool of an isolated population that it becomes
sufficiently different that we consider it a different species, and
then a new arrow splits off of the main arrow

(14:47):
as it runs down the page, and this becomes a
branch in the trunk of the tree of life. Now
you have to imagine that to account for all of
the life on Earth. This is happening millions and millions
of times, mapping out a all of the organisms on
the planets, Branches peeling off of the trunk and off
of other branches, just sort of pouring down the page

(15:07):
like a genetic waterfall. And that's like that, that's the
tree of life. But you notice that all of the
movement on the page is, as we've said, vertical. It's
going from the top to bottom. Now, what if there
were a way to get genetic information to travel in
a different direction along the page. Presumably it can't travel

(15:30):
from bottom to top, right, because if the top to
bottom direction is the arrow of time, essentially, then you're
destroying causality exactly, universe turns inside out. Yeah, so you
can't travel back up the page unless you get a
gene that gains a mutation permitting time travel. Uh. Is
that part of Warhammer? No? No, they as far as

(15:50):
I know, it isn't. But they do use event horizon
style faster than light to travel. Oh oh man, another
reason I got to check this out. But anyway, you
can't go back up the page. But what if you
didn't have to go straight down? What if a gene
could travel sideways across the page rather than straight down.

(16:11):
And this gets to the concept that we're going to
be focusing on today. It's horizontal gene transfer. So I
want to back up and talk about a sort of
fascinating precursor experiment to the main concept that we're getting to.
And this is something that's known as Griffith's experiment. So

(16:33):
before we even knew that hereditary traits were passed on
through d n A, an English bacteriologist named Fred Griffith
published findings from a really weird experiment and unfortunately it
involved killing some mice with pneumonia. That's gonna happen, yeah,
But anyway, Griffith started with two different strains of bacteria,

(16:55):
which was strepped to caucus pneumonia. So I pronounced that
sounds good to me, pneumonia. I believe in it. Okay,
So there are two strains of this bacteria. You've got
an R strain and that stands for rough, and this
strain of the bacteria is harmless. You can put it
in the mouse and the mouse is fine it it's
immune system takes care of it. It's just not a problem.

(17:18):
But then there is an S strain standing for smooth,
and that means that this bacterium is contained inside a
little capsule. This is a bio structure of a kind
that helps the bacterium survive encounters with the host's immune system.
A suit of power arm Yeah, it's a yeah. It's
like an armored exoskeleton for for the bacterium. It allows

(17:41):
it to resist phagocytosis, where you know where the immune
system cell engulfs and eats the other cell. And for
this reason, the S strain is dangerous and it can
kill any lab mice. It in effects. You take it on,
you can get pneumonia and die. Okay, so what did
he What did he find? Andy and Jack? So we
found you inject mice with the harmless R strain and

(18:05):
they're fine. Okay, it's rough, it's not gonna hurt them.
You inject mice with the S strain, they get sick
and die. You inject mice with dead S strain and
they're fine. So you can cook the S strain to
kill all the bacteria. And of course this dead bacteria
doesn't hurt the mice. You can dead strain no problem.

(18:27):
But if you inject the mice with a combination of
the two previously harmless injections, the R strain and the
dead cooked S strain, the mice die. Ah, So the
harmless R strain is taking something. It's it's it's robbing

(18:47):
the corpse of the of the of the dead strain
and taking something from it and incorporating it into itself.
That seems to be what's happening. It looks like the
R strain bacteria are scavenging the dead S strain bacteria
for the genes needed to produce those capsules to make
them S strain bacteria that are virulent and will kill

(19:09):
the host. And what do you know? Griffith looked at
the dead mice from the final group, and they contained
live S strain bacteria, even though he had not put
any live S strain bacteria into them. And this formed
the basis of experimental confirmation for a process that would
eventually come to be known as transformation. And they didn't

(19:30):
have the terms to fully understand or describe exactly what
was going on. Yet, you know, like I said that,
this was before we even knew that d n A
was the thing that passed genes from from parent to child.
But this was an example of what would come to
be known as horizontal gene transfer, and so horizontal gene
transfer also known as lateral gene transfer. Though I think

(19:52):
I see the term horizontal more often used these days,
it seems like lateral is an older term. But it's
the exchange of dn nay between organisms of the same generation.
So it's not that the bacterium divides and makes a
copy of its genome, but that one way or another,
some of its genes get inserted into the bacterium next door.

(20:14):
So that's pretty weird and pretty cool on its own.
So what are the primary avenues along which this kind
of thing happens. Well, there are several different HDT mechanisms,
but scientists identify three core transfer mistace. So we've got
that first one transformation, right, transformation that's the uptake of
naked DNA, and it's a common method, but it's mostly

(20:36):
limited to bacteria and it only permits the exchange of
short DNA fragments. Right, So these little sort of severed
circles of isolated DNA known as plasmids. Right, But then
there's something called transduction, and this is the transfer of
DNA from one bacterium to another via their bacterial fadges. Now,
generally this requires close related bacteria, and the transfer size

(21:00):
depends on the size of the bacterial foge head. So
this might be kind of a crude analogy. But for
for a crude analogy, imagine if you could take on
traits of another person's genome by by getting bitten by
the same mosquito that they were bitten by. So in

(21:20):
this case, that you've got a virus, a bacteria phage
that that hits one bacterium, takes some of its genome,
hits another bacterium, and now there's been some cross pollination
of the genes. Yes, and by the way, I would
love to see that incorporated into a vampire movie sometime. Oh,
but it continued. The third mechanism is conjunction. This is

(21:42):
the transfer of DNA by plasmid from a donor cell
to a recumbinant recipient. And this one requires cell to
cell contact, but it can occur between distantly related bacteria
or even bacteria and eukaryotic cells, and it can transfer
long fragments of DNA. Okay, so this is something more
like bacterial sex, and it's not really sex because obviously

(22:06):
they're not sexually reproducing with full recombination like like you
know humans would or something, right, But at the very
basics of it, it's it's just kind of what's it's
a conjugal union of prokaryotic cells. But but yeah, as
you said, this can apparently happen between even some prokaryotic
and eukaryotic cells. Uh. The difference that that's something we're

(22:27):
gonna be talking about in this episode. The main difference
being that a prokaryotic cell doesn't have a distinct nucleus
and the eukaryotic cell has a nucleus. Yeah. Prokaryots include
you know, microscopic single cell organisms, bacteria and standing bacteria.
But but then on the other hand, the eu carriats
that includes pretty much everything else. Yeah, okay, so those

(22:48):
are the basics, but we definitely want to stress that
horizontal gene transfer is a subject that's continuing to evolve.
Our understanding how it continues to evolve. Yeah, it's in fact,
one of the I would say, according to what I've read,
one of the biggest and most interesting controversies in microbiology
and genetics today. Yeah, and we continued as well discussed

(23:08):
I mean, there's some big findings that continue to come
out as we map various uh, various organisms genomes and
discover hey, there's some Pilford content in there. Um. We
already touched on the early twentieth century. Uh origins of
this really are sort of our earliest understandings of horizontal
gene transfer. Um. Another big study that is often mentioned

(23:31):
out there came in ninety one, and that's when Victor J.
Freeman published Studies on the virulence of bacterial fage infected
strains of Corina Bacterium diphtheria in the Journal of Bacteriology.
And this is a paper that explored the manner by
which a virulent strains of C. Ditheria infected with bacterial
foge yielded virulent C. Detherius strains. Okay, so that sounds

(23:56):
kind of like sort of like the Griffith study, seeing
how on one strain of bacterium can take on the
properties of another one, but this time it sounds like
it's talking about bacteria fage mediated transfer. So so that's
more that that transduction method, you know, the mosquito bites
one bacterium and then another. Okay, but you may notice

(24:18):
so far that we're primarily talking about prokaryotic life here,
like like we said, single celled organisms like bacteria and
archaea and uh. And we've known for a while now
that bacteria can trade jeans horizontally. That that's something that,
as we've showed, we started to learn in the twentieth century.
But one of the most startling discoveries of recent decades

(24:38):
is that we're starting to become aware how much horizontal
gene transfer might actually be taking place and have taken
place in the evolutionary history of eukaryotic organisms, more complex
organisms like plants, uh, fungi, and animals, And generally speaking,
here we're talking about the ex change of genetic material

(25:01):
between different species. One species steals or lifts genes from
another organism and incorporates the genes into its own genetic makeup. Now,
at the end, I think we should talk about exactly
how appropriate the metaphor of stealing or lifting is, because
because in many cases here, I think it'd be better
to take a look at exactly what the real active

(25:22):
agent in the processes. And of course it's it's not
going to be conscious. You know, you don't have an
animal trying to steal the genes of another animal as
far as I know. But that's the thing. The more
that we the more examples we see of it, the
more ubiquitous horizontal gene transfer appears to be, you start realizing, well,
this is this is not just some weird quirk that
pops up among some you know, very distantly related creature.

(25:45):
This is more a part of the fabric of how
how life works. Yeah, well it's it's a thing that
should come more naturally to our intuitions than it does,
I think, because we tend to think of an animal
or any organism's genome is a sort of like a
platonic essence of what that creature really is. But in fact,

(26:09):
your genome is not an unalterable platonic essence. I mean,
we know, of course that it can go through recombination,
It can you know, be uh mixed up with another
genome through sex. It can have mutations that are introduced
independently somehow. We we've internalized all of those exceptions and said, well,
that's normal. That's part of the normal. Uh, that's normal modification.

(26:33):
It's a normal genetic modification. But you just don't get
the sense that genes should be jumping between different species
genomes like this. But it kind of makes sense because
your genome is it's molecules, you know, it's physical matter.
It's not this little bundle of your soul coated into
you know, these little these little drawlings of d n A. Yeah.

(26:55):
And because it's molecules in physical matter, it is subject
to physical contact and cross contamination. But it's certainly it's
the more we we discover about it, really that the
more we're having to to reframe how we understand what
life isn't who we are. Well, I think we should
switch to looking at some of these examples of eu

(27:16):
karyotic or more complex organisms that have been suggested as
alleged gene stealers. Yes, because for the same reason we
started with a couple of Sci Fi examples to sort
of set the stage for what horizontal gene transfer is.
The specific examples uh, from the natural world, I feel
like they work best to really let you understand what's
going on and what the ultimate impact is. By looking

(27:38):
at specific examples. So we're gonna take a quick break,
and when we come back, we are going to look
at some brand new research regarding the old water bear.
All right, we're back, Joe, you're familiar with the water

(28:00):
a bear, dear Klein of Asa barin the tartar grade.
I love tartar grades. Man. The moths pickle it. That
the slow stepper, which which I love because that makes
a tartar grade feel a little I don't know, like
like you could be a hip hop artist, you know,
the slow steppa. Oh, that's really cool. I yeah, I

(28:21):
love tartar grades. That for a long time here at
how stuff works. The background on my computer screen was
a was a huge blown up microphotography image of a
tartar grade. And I don't know, something about these organisms
is so cool. I always like reading new news about them,
even if it's kind of boring news. Honestly, it's like

(28:42):
study finds tartar grades live in a lake in Minnesota. Also,
you know, well, yeah it's still tarta grades. I like it. Yeah,
they're they're pretty great because at one hand they're very
alien looking, and yet they wind up looking kind of cute.
They look a little cuddly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they simultaneously
look like something that you want to cuddle, but that
if they were big enough, they would suck all your

(29:03):
liquids out. So when we're talking about tartar grades, we're
talking about members of the phylum Tartar gratta uh. And
there are more than eleven hundred species out there in
that phylum that we know about, and they're they're just
pretty much everywhere, right Yeah. I mean you'll find them
in moss and lichens and hot springs, Antarctic ice, deep

(29:26):
sea trenches, Himalayan mountaintops. I mean, they're they're hardy little
s o b s. And they can even as I'm
sure everyone is familiar with from headlines, they can even
survive the extreme cold and radiation of outer space. Yeah.
I think they're often cited as examples of the kind
of extreme a phile organisms that UH people like to
invoke when they're talking about things like the pan spermia hypothesis.

(29:48):
You know, like the idea that that life forms uh
in early incipient life forms traveled from planet to planet
or from star to star on on comets or pieces
of matter through space, and you think, well, how could
they survive? That people point to these really hardy organisms
like you know, a deep sea vent ar chia or
tartar grades or something to say, well, look, this thing

(30:10):
can survive almost anything. Yeah, because it's reasonably advanced but
very hardy. Um and and this is crazy. You can
just you can just find them about anywhere. And according
to the International Society of Tartar Grade Hunters, UH, you'll
find their website by the way at Tartar Grade Hunters
dot Weebli dot com. Is that considered small game hunting.
It's a very small game. I guess I'll include a

(30:32):
link to that on landing page for this episode of
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But according to
this website, UH, you can find them yourself by following
some basic extructions on their website. I'm gonna read out
the short versions here, but they provide more detailed instructions
as well as some alternate users submitted methods as well.
So you want to grab some terrestrial tartar grades, all

(30:54):
you have to do is put a little like in
moss or whatever in a shower low plate of water.
H you agitate your sample, and you look through the
debris at the bottom of the dish for tartar grades.
Then you grab a micro microscope and you look at
tartar grades. Uh. And if you want some marine tartar grades,
you just go out to the beach. You wait, tell

(31:15):
us low tide. You scoop a bunch of sand. At
low tide, you sort of work your way back up
to the high tide mark, and then you shock them
with some fresh water. This uh, this shocks them into
letting go of their sand particles. And then you just
grab a colander or a sieve and you just start
moving it around. Bam, you've got some tartar grades. You
grab a microscope and you look at them. Okay, well

(31:36):
I'm gonna have to do that. Now does it matter
that you actually stand at the beach and wait for
low tide or can you just come back at low tide?
I think you just come back at low t But
but yeah, they're they're everywhere. Um and and as we've discussed,
their party is all get out. Well I want to
hear about some horizontal gene transfer. I assume that's what
we're getting to yes there, because it turns out they
have quite a bit of a foreign DNA, which which

(32:00):
that the head of the science headlines really had a
lot of fun with this, saying, you know, animal that
can survive in space has foreign DNA, thus implying in
the headline that they had foreign DNA from another planet.
But this, this is not quite what's going on here,
but it's still super exciting. This is very very exciting
end of the tartar grade news pool, I would say. Uh, so,

(32:21):
this is a new study that it was published just
in the last month in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, and it's from the Universe researchers from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So they
sequenced the tartar grade geno and in doing so they
found that seventeen point five percent of the creatures DNA
is foreign in nature. So they're nearly one six stolen

(32:44):
goods man. Yeah, so and that this is the new record.
Oh really Yeah, because previously microscopic rota first held the
record for encompassing the most foreign DNA and their genome.
But now the tartar grades come along and they pretty
much doubled the pre existing score. Um so, now hold on,

(33:05):
is that is that the record for eukaryotes or what
does that include like bacteria and stuff. Yeah, I believe
this is the eukaryote. Yeah. I don't know what the
number would be for prokaryotes though, it just seems like
with them trading, trading as much as they do. Yeah,
my understanding is that it's higher among them. So, as
it turns out, tarte grades acquire genes from various organisms.

(33:26):
They get it from fungi, plants, our chaa bacteria. Those
are micro microorganisms that are similar to bacteria in size
and simplicity of structure, but the radically different in molecular organization.
But they mostly loot from bacteria, and the unc researchers
theorized that this just might be the source of the
water bear strength. It's because their gene stealers, they harvest,

(33:49):
harvest the best genes from all the organisms. Yeah, because
when you when you look at life on Earth, like
the life that's able to thrive and the most extreme environments,
you know, be at a you know, around a deep
sea thermal vent or you know, at the top of
a mountain, the deepest part of the ocean, you're generally
talking about bacteria, right, Yeah, And so the theory here

(34:10):
is that Yeah, they've basically stolen from the best they've
like the like the the the xeno morph. It has
gone after one of the most successful organisms on the
planet and said, hey, I'm going to take some of
what's working for that organism, and then I'm gonna work
exceptionally well, and as soon as the predators arrive, it's
gonna take their genes too. Yeah, and then yeah, the

(34:31):
xeno morph is realistically gonna win in any encounter. So
how does this work? How does this go down? Well,
the tartar grade, of course, is known for its ability
to survive an extreme environment, such as extreme cold, extreme
dry situations. And when it does that, it's DNA breaks up,
and then when it rehydrates, the cell membrane and nucleus
around the DNA becomes permeable, permeable enough for foreign DNA

(34:55):
and molecules to leak through. So as the Tartar grade
then re high grates and essentially regenerates, it stitches its
own damage DNA and any foreign genetic bits together into
a single patchwork genome. Now it sounds to me, I
don't actually know this from the research, and so I'm
just guessing here. It sounds to me like that might

(35:15):
be kind of a I don't know, like a high
risk strategy, like high risk high reward because what you
just described, even though it might in many cases grant
you access to some very useful genes that help you
survive in tough environments, it sounds like it can also
likely cause bad copying problems and introduce garbage into your

(35:38):
genome and kill you. Yeah, a lot of brundle fly
Tarte grades out there, you would think, and then those
I guess what, those would die out and it would
be the other strains that would survive or I don't know,
maybe it's got a good mechanism for making that not
such a low risk thing. That was just a I
wonder about that. Well, it does make me think back
to how many different Tarte grades we have again over

(35:59):
different the sees that we know of, So that seems
to h to balance well with this idea that that
they so so easily can start incorporating new DNA via
horizontal gene transfer. So that's a Tarte grade again. A
fabulous animal that probably deserves its own own podcast episode outright,
But we know now, we we knew it was an

(36:20):
amazing critter before and now we know that it is
engaging in horizontal gene transfer. What else do we have
on the superstar list here, Joe? Well, how about I
love this example because do you love coffee? Robert? I
know I know the answer you. Yes, you do love coffee,
of course you do. But do you know how much
you should hate the coffee berry borer beetle? I do not, well? Uh,

(36:44):
coffee berry borer beetle also known as a hypothenamous hempei.
It's this tiny, tiny beetle like adults are between one
and two millimeters and it's a horrible, horrible pest on
coffee crops. It is just the bane of coffee growers. Instance,
it's native to Africa, but now it lives pretty much
anywhere coffee has grown. And this beetle isn't just a pest,

(37:08):
it is a gene stealer. So in February, research published
in p n AS revealed that the coffee berry borer
beetle is a known case of an animal. So that
this is interesting because it's you know, it's an insect.
It's a fairly complex animal. Yeah, we're moving up from
part of grades and from some of the earlier examples Yeah,

(37:28):
it has stolen demonstrably beneficial genes from bacteria. And that's
an interesting thing to point out. It's not just that
it has a gene that looks like it came from bacteria,
but we don't know what it does or it doesn't
really help. It has a gene that very clearly helps
the beetle survive. So it acquired a prokaryotic upgrade pack.

(37:51):
So the bacterial gene that the beetle has incorporated helps
with the digestion of a particularly difficult food, the harbohydrates
found in coffee beans. And you might be thinking to
yourself already, well, yeah, I love coffee, but a creature
cannot live by coffee alone, Like how much usable food
energy is really there in a coffee bean. I love coffee,

(38:13):
but I would not want to try to survive on coffee.
It would just be a constant, horrible existence of the
fear coming in waves and waves. But the coffee berry
borer beetle happens to have a gene known as h
h man one or man would you say it man
h h M a N one which allows it to

(38:34):
make a pro protein called manonaise, not mayonnaise, but manonaise,
and this protein is used in digestion to break down
and digest a kind of nasty polysaccharide sugar called and
I didn't make this up Galacta man in Galacta man. Yeah.

(38:55):
Before doing this episode, I've never heard of Galacta man in.
Before I looked it up. They were out playing a joke.
This is not an April Fools article. That's the real
name of that sugar. So the scientists believe that the
beetle gene somehow came from the beatles own gut bacteria.
So small scale hybridization with one's own indo symbient, this

(39:19):
is a weird universe, yeah, because I mean we've covered
on the podcast here and I feel like a lot
of our listeners are probably, you know, caught onto the
growing body of of science surrounding our own microbiome. But
we still kind of think of that is this internal population,
but not a population that's going to upgrade into management,
right right exactly. Yeah, So the question is how do

(39:41):
they know that the Beatles gene for digesting this, this
horrible sugar found in coffee beans came from the bacteria
and it's not just some you know mutation or insect
gene or something. Well, from what I read, I believe
they're not a hundred percent sure it came from the bacteria,
but they think the evidence is pretty strong that it did.

(40:01):
And the evidence includes the fact that the gene is
not otherwise present in insects. Uh. It looks very similar
to the bacterial gene for breaking down Galacta mannon. And
the scientists discovered that the gene sits book ended by
two sections of genetic code known as transposons, also known

(40:22):
as jumping genes, and so transposons were identified by the
geneticist Barbara mcclinic in the nineteen forties in Corn and
I was just thinking we should do a whole episode
about Barbara mcclinic sometime. It would probably be the most
interesting way you can possibly discuss corn for an hour.
But anyway, So transposons, but she discovered this is the

(40:43):
name for genes that can travel around and insert themselves
into different places within a genome. They're they're molecularly apt
to move and insert in different places throughout the genetic code.
So there we have an indication of alien DNA in
the beetle, plus a plausible method for insertion into the

(41:04):
animals chromosomes, at least at that level. But this does
bring up an interesting question in in the idea of
horizontal gene transfer in complex animals like insects, how does
it become part of the animals genome from generation to generation.
The prokaryotes are single celled organisms without a define nucleus,
and they can pretty easily incorporate new genes into the genome.

(41:26):
But with eukaryotes, how do you get the fugitive gene
into the chromosomes inside the nucleus? And then furthermore, it's
more complicated than that because you need to get them
not just into any nucleus, not just in like the
nucleus in the cells in your arm or something. If
you wanted to become part of the genome of the

(41:47):
species continuing throughout the generations, it needs to get into
the chromosomes in the nucleus of the germ cells like
the sperm or egg cells. And as far as I
can tell, how this happened is not yet very well
understood unless there's there's research I'm not aware of yet,
And if any of our listeners know about that, we'd

(42:07):
we'd love to hear about that, because this part is fascinating.
How how do the genes get in there? For complex
reproducing animals? Yeah, because there's no there's no alien species
coming in and shoving its ovipositor in or launching anything
onto your face. Yeah. So so you can see at
the molecular level how it might work if you've got

(42:28):
transposons at either end, that can you know, So you
can see how it fits into the genome once it's there.
But how does it get to the genome? I don't know.
There may be an answer to that I'm not aware
of yet, but very interesting question at least. Yeah, indeed.
But hey, those are not the only examples of gene
stealing animals. What else animals, plants, and all kinds of organisms.

(42:52):
What else have we got for stars? We have Asian clams.
They're strictly a sexual, but these hermaphroditic mom us spice
things up a bit to avoid just complete genetic stagnation,
and so in this case it means a little gene theft.
While they generally fertilize their own eggs, they sometimes fertilize
those of of another clam species, and this gives the

(43:12):
resulting offspring an injection of fresh alien genes. Um. We
mentioned rotifers earlier, the delloid rotifers. Uh. They sometimes they're
referred to as the quote ancient a sexuals. I don't
really know anything about these. What's the deal. They're they're
they're pretty cool. They're an all female species of near
microscopic animals and they've been sex free for about eighty

(43:34):
million years, and they're you know, they're they're a variety
of them, and they look really cool. Um, you know
when when you look at their their bodies, uh, under
a microscope. And as we previously noted, they used to
have the record for the most pilfered genes among the
eukaryots according but according and according to a two thousand
and twelve University of Cambridge study, that number was ten

(43:55):
percent of their expressed genes were pilfered from roughly five
other species. So then they incorporate the fore in DNA
from fungi, plants and bacteria of course, while they're patching
up their own own ruptured cell membrane. So so very similar. Uh,
it sounds like to what we're discussing with the tartar grades.
And then there's Galderia sulfur ari These are is a

(44:17):
single celled red algae that thrives and sunlit hot springs,
but it also manages UH to stay alive in deep
dark depths, and the algae simply stole some genetic strap
traits from simpler bacteria and archaea organisms. Up next, this
one is a very exciting UH organism to mention here,
and that is Alicia chlorotica. So if you ever see

(44:40):
a sea slug with the power of photosynthesis, you can
rest assured that they stole it, right, they stole photosynthesis. Yeah,
the the you know, the the domain of of plants. Yeah,
I typically think that is sort of a fundamental UH
separator indicator for for plants versus animals. Plant can photosynthe
the size it has the chloroplasts that it needs. Animals

(45:02):
don't have that, except this one does because it stole
it from algae um. They they actually produce chlorophyll. They're
a chlorophyll producing mollusks. And the slugs even passed the
chlorophyll producing trade onto their off bring though they have
to eat a bunch of algae to actually carry out
that photosynthesis. But yeah, this is like an obvious trade like,

(45:24):
it's one thing to say, Oh, it turns out this
organism it has some trades that it stole, like this one,
you could tell something as weird as going on. It's
like a turtle on a fence post. You know, you
don't know how it got up there, but you know
it has some help. And in this case the help
came in the form of horizontal gene transfer. Nice. I'd
actually read about that one a little bit before, and

(45:44):
that started me as one of the weirdest and most
interesting because that's um you know. One one of the
things that I've noticed in some of the literature is
that most often these these stolen genes tend to have
something to do with digestion or metabolism, which I think
is interesting because most of the time they are coming

(46:04):
from simpler organisms like bacteria or something. So you're not
going to steal a gene for i don't know, making
stag horns or something like that from bacteria, but very
likely you might steal a gene for being able to
process a certain type of molecule into food, and and
so that makes sense. But here here it's not a

(46:25):
it's not a digestion molecule for like for a different
type of sugar or something. It's for sunlight itself. I
don't know. I find that very interesting. You know, it's
only fitting that since we started off talking about about
the alien xenomorph, which of course has a lot in
common with various uh parasitic wasps, it's it's perfect that

(46:47):
we also get to include a little parasitic wasp action here. Right.
In science in two thousand nine, there was an article
called polidinaviruses of Brackenid wasps derived from an ancestral new devirus,
and that suggested that they're so there are these parasitic
wasps that that they inject host caterpillars with these virus

(47:09):
derived particles that inhibit the caterpillars immune system, so that
the wasps can implant their eggs in the caterpillar, and
then the eggs can hatch and eat the caterpillar from
the inside and get a nursery, get get a wonderful
little little corpse nursery. And so where where did the

(47:29):
wasps get these virus like particles that they inject into
the caterpillar in order to inhibit the immune system. Well,
the discovery is that the wasp genome learned how to
make these particles by incorporating the genome of a virus
about a hundred million years ago. And so the suggestion
is that it it pulled in the virus's genome, said

(47:52):
you're part of my body plan now, and used that
to make at a byproduct of the struct sure of
this virus to use as a weapon against these caterpillars. Wow,
now that that is incredible. Yeah. And up next we
have a plant. Uh. This is uh not quite as
exciting as parasitic wasps, but it concerns the sweet potato.

(48:14):
Is this a sweet potato that stabs you with virus particles? Uh?
And fortunately not fortunately it hasn't picked up that habit.
But a two thousand fifteen study by Ghent University and
the International Potato Institute or or c I p SIP.
Uh they should have got a chip in there, an
ache in there, somehow to naked chip International Hot Potato Universe. Yeah. Oh.

(48:35):
They published in the journal p and As and revealed
that sweet potatoes from all over the world naturally contain
genes from the bacterium agro Bacterium. Uh. And in this
particular article they even go so far as to say
that you consider you could consider this a quote natural
GMO food product. Yeah, the implications for GMOs are kind
of interesting because, uh, what a lot of people seem

(48:59):
opposed to about gema. I mean, there are a lot
of different reasons people give for being opposed to, uh
to transgenic food crops, but a lot of it is
just kind of like, that's not natural. It's not natural
to put genes from bacteria or a fish or something
like that into a plant in order to make it,
you know, do whatever be a more successful crop, be

(49:21):
resistant to uh to herbicides or pesticides or whatever it
is they're doing with it now. I do think people
should be should have concerns about the methods used to
produce the food they eat, but this one particular concern like, oh,
you know, transgenic crops, that's not natural. That seems untrue.

(49:44):
It kind of is natural for plants to get genes
from other places. Yeah. I think that's one of the
that's that's one of the lessons, uh that this topic
gives us. You know that that we learned that this
the horizontal gene transfer, means that this kind of genetic
modification occurs now truly, and it's not. It's not merely
to the domain of very ancient organisms or entirely fictional organisms. Uh.

(50:08):
It seems to be a part of life itself. Yeah.
So one of the strange things that you might be
starting to wonder is if you karyotic organisms like plants
and animals and fungi, if they swipe genes from other organisms,
does that mean that even the human genome contains a
decent amount of foreign DNA? And the answer is quite possibly. Uh.

(50:33):
Just this year in there was a paper published in
Genome Biology called expression of multiple horizontally acquired genes is
a hallmark of both vertebrate and invertebrate genomes, and they
combine previous and new research to suggest a running total
of a hundred and forty five genes in humans that
they think have leapt into the human genome from simpler

(50:56):
organisms at some point in our evolutionary past. Though, however,
an interesting thing they point out is that fewer HGT
genes seem to have showed up in the recent history
of primates. I want to read a quote from from
their findings. They say, genome wide comparative and phylogenetic analyzes
show that h g T and animals typically gives rise

(51:18):
to tens or hundreds of active foreign genes, largely concerned
with metabolism, like we were talking about earlier. A lot
of these seem to have to do with how you
can digest and make energy out of different kinds of foods.
But picking back up with their their words, our analyzes
suggests that while fruit flies and nematodes have continued to

(51:39):
acquire foreign genes throughout their revolution, humans and other primates
have gained relatively few since their common ancestor. So I
interpreted this to mean that as you carry outes become
more complex, their rate of gene stealing can generally be
expected to decrease. So it could be mistaken about that interpretation,
but that's what I took away from it. Well, yeah,

(52:00):
I couldn't help but think of gene theft in these organisms,
like thinking of each organism as say, you know, a
castle or some sort of a gaming like some sort
of a game scenario, right, Like it's one thing for
all this level of theft to be going on and
you know, among some crude huts out there on the plane,
but then for it to take place within the castle walls,
for it to take place within the castle itself. For

(52:22):
it to take place in the king's bedroom or in
the throne room perhaps will be a better analogy. That
becomes it becomes increasingly more difficult to imagine it, and
maybe that's the case. Well, yeah, and that is sort
of what I was talking about earlier when I was
bringing up this weird concern about you know, we have
cell nuclei, we have you know, we have all these
things that would seem to make it harder for this

(52:44):
kind of genetic cross contamination to occur. Yeah, So like
we're trying to figure out what's causing and how what
exact mechanism is taking place. It's kind of like looking
at the scenari and saying, how's the thief getting in here?
Where is he or she hiding? What's the escape route?
We're trying to understand exactly how that work. Yeah, And
so one thing about this last study I mentioned is
it should be pointed out that I read at least

(53:04):
a couple of comments from scientists essentially claiming not to
be convinced that the authors had shown that these genes
and complex animals like humans were projects or products of
horizontal gene transfer. For example, there was a science magazine
news right up of the study that cited a dissenting
opinion from the microbiologist Jonathan Eisen and while he didn't

(53:26):
rule out h GT and complex animals, he wasn't like
that can't happen. He just felt that the authors of
the paper hadn't sufficiently ruled out other non h g
T explanations for the presence of these seemingly alien genes.
But anyway, that's an interesting frontier that I think the
science is still developing, and I'll be very interested to
see what else we learn and what comes of more

(53:49):
review of this type of science. But I want to
get back to the analogy I brought up earlier in
the episode. This this model that has been so common
in evolutionary thinking really since the time of Darwin, and
it's it's the tree of life analogy. It seems that
we're discovering all the time that even complex eukaryotic organisms

(54:13):
trade genes with their contemporaries. And if this is true,
I think it might be the case that the tree
of life model, you know, flowing unidirectionally from trunk to branches,
from top to bottom, isn't necessarily the best analogy anymore. Instead,
maybe it should be more like the tumble we could life,
where there is sort of a basic one directional flow

(54:36):
of the branches. They don't go back toward the roots,
but there's a whole lot of perpendicular cross connections and
knots and tangles, and that there might not be a
single trunk at the beginning, but rather another strange knot
of traded criss crossing genetic pathways. There's a great piece

(54:58):
that came out in Ian magazine Ene. It's a December
two thousand fourteen essay called the Gene That Jumped by
Ferrish Jabbar. And I want to read just a quick
quote from this, and we'll be sure to include conclude
a link to this full essay on the landing page
for this episode. Um Jabbar rights quote. Standard evolutionary theory
does not account for the possibility of complex organisms suddenly

(55:20):
acquiring genes from other species, let alone how those foreign
genes might change a creature for better or worse. Think
of it this way. If the genomes of living species
are flowers on different branches of the great evolutionary tree
of life, horizontal gene transfer is a subversive wind whipping
pollen from one part of the tree to another. I

(55:43):
think that's beautifully expressed, and I really really liked this essay.
I I recommend our listeners to check it out because
I think it's an excellent overview of the subject we've
been talking about today. Yeah, so if you find yourself
thirsting for more about this topic and you're not sure
where to go next, I've I would highly recommend that
at that essay. Okay, So there's one last thing I

(56:04):
do want to bring up before we we conclude our
discussion of horizontal gene transfer, and it's it's something about
the analogies we've been using throughout this episode. We've spoken
of the whole organism as a gene stealer. In the
case of this horizontal gene transfer, I'll take a gene
from you. I'll take a gene from you, and I'll
make it part of myself and pass it on to
my kids. But I wonder if it would make more

(56:27):
sense to think about it backwards instead of gene steelers
the whole organisms as gene steelers. To think about a
gene invader looking for a suitable host, Because from a
certain point of view, you can say it's not the
individual or even the entire genome that is the agent
driving evolution, But it's that each individual gene within a

(56:49):
genome competes for its own survival and reproduction. So if
you think about each genome sort of like an ecosystem
for genes, if a gene can survive outside the original
ecosystem where it originated by invading a different genome, why
wouldn't it do that too? Why not spread to more

(57:10):
fertile territory. And if it contributes to the overall health
of the ecosystem, and this and that would be the analogy.
But meaning it provides a survival advantage to the owner
of the host genome, all the better. Um. So I
think that's another interesting way of putting thinking about it,
to sort of flip this on its head, because we
know certainly that these organisms are not attempting to steal

(57:33):
genes consciously, but but the genes are out there and
that uh, and that the whole complexity of biological life
is driven by the desire of each gene to make
as many copies of itself as possible, And we've discovered
a new way it can do that. It doesn't just
divide and copy it doesn't just sexually reproduce, but it

(57:56):
can also kind of drift. It can also invade and
and take over somebody else's house and become part of
the new neighborhood. Yeah. I love the other way you
put this because it does, I mean, it drives home
how difficult it is for us to to take into
account that there's no there's no consistent us. There's no

(58:18):
that that we are not set in stone. That's certainly,
and that works on several different levels. I mean, the
me that I am now is not the me that
I was ten years ago, or the personnel be ten
years from now, where this continually changing individual, and even
that individual is kind of a council of selves, and
and then that that in that then the individual body.

(58:40):
You know, we discussed the micro genome, we discussed all
the individual parts that make make us up as a whole.
Where essentially this large corporation of smaller things. And so yeah,
when when one employee jumps and joins this corporation, we
might think, oh, we have acquired an individual, we have
inquired a trade, we've inquired a skill set, acquired a

(59:00):
skill set into our being. But then on the other hand,
there is an individual worker who simply said, Hey, there's
a corporation that I can thrive in and uh, and
I'm better at doing what I do than several of
the current employees. I think I could I could carve
out a place for myself in this new home. Yeah,
economics starts with the individual, right, Yeah, there you go.

(59:23):
So really we are like the Warhammer forty forty k universe.
We were taking bits of Tolkien, and we're taking bits
of of cone and the Barbarian. We're taking bits of Alien,
of event Horizon, maybe of cone Heads. Why not cone Heads?
I would love to see a cone Head army. And
the Warhammer forty thousand universe. Um, yeah, I need going

(59:43):
straight from France. Yeah, but yeah, I think I think
Warhammer forty thousand is is an excellent metaphor for for
the sort of a view on life that horizontal gene
transfer gives us. That did all these elements come together
and even though they're all kind of pilfred and olan
and acquired, they all take on a unique form of life. Uh,

(01:00:04):
in the the ultimate individual that you see in the
ultimate franchise that you that you play with under tabletop.
I was about to say that's deep. But instead what
I'm gonna say is that's broad well put well put
all right. So so there you go horizontal gene transfer
and and again will include some some resources for you

(01:00:24):
to move on to if you you feel like you
want some more depth on this particular topic, right uh.
In the meantime, again, head on over to stuff to
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