The ability of some creatures to swap in and out fragments of DNA is among the weirdest things going on in nature. Most living things on Earth, including humans, receive DNA from our parents almost exclusively, e.g. through reproduction, and we’re more or less stuck with that DNA for life. We can’t just brush up against someone on the subway that happens to have a set of desired traits and somehow receive and then incorporate their genetic code into ours. We might get the forward guard of some bacterial colony or viral pool that fellow subway rider hosts in their body, but their DNA? No, not so much.It would be a marvelous ability though and genetic modification is considered to be the promised land of medicine, but, as is, midlife changes to our genetic code mostly just cause cancer. Bacteria, however, are champions of DNA swapping and this ability is part of what makes harmful bacteria all the more sketchy. What they’re very often swapping, it turns out, is resistance to our drugs. For the very first time, researchers have identified the precise pathway by which bacteria eject useful chunks of their code through the cells’ bilayer membrane. It’s a potentially crucial discovery with not only implications in beating antibiotic resistance, but in whole other schemes of human genetic medicine.The work, published today in the journal Nature, describes two different structures, one located on the inner membrane of bacterial walls and the other on the outer, outside wall. The two are linked by stalks traversing the gap between the two membranes (the periplasm), with the result being something like pores.In a press release from the University of London, lead author Prof. Gabriel Waksman gushes: “This work is a veritable tour de force. The entire complex is absolutely huge and its structure is unprecedented. It is the type of work which is ground-breaking and will provide an entirely new direction to the field. Next, we need to understand how bacteria use this structure to get a movie of how antibiotics resistance genes are moved around." The potential beginning of the end for antibiotic resistance? Well, then.It’s actually quite a bit more than that even. While humans may not be hotbeds of casual gene swapping, there remains the possibility of receiving new genetic material in our cells—that could be programmed to do all kinds of livesaving things—but we need something like bacteria and its marvelous DNA transfer system to do the actual transfer work. In essence, we might be able to load up a bacterial cell with some lab-created code and set it loose on human cells. So, yes, bacteria is a potential hacking mechanism for the human body, a tiny USB key to reprogram ailing parts of the human mainframe.
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