Friday, June 29, 2007

Bacterial genome swapping -Lauren


First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changes One Species To Another

This is pretty cool: researchers at the J Craig Venter Institute have transplanted the chromosome from one simple species of bacteria into another, successfully transforming the bacteria into the other species. They purposefully chose species (Mycoplasma capricolum and Mycoplasma mycoides) that have very small genomes, and marked the genome of M. mycoides so that bacteria with its chromosome turned blue. This allowed them to identify colonies of M. capricolum that successfully transformed into M. mycoides.

The photograph shows colonies of transformed bacteria.

This article (about the same experiment) says that only 1 of every 150,000 cells is successfully transformed, so this is still a very inefficient process.

Wow, even more!

I just clicked on another link, and here are two more very recent articles:

Evolution is...

Life as We Know It

Darwin is so hot right now!

--Julie

So much Darwin!

I just went to the science news section of the New York Times and wow, three Darwin/evolution articles! I wanted to share these with you all while they were still hot so here they are:

From a Few Genes, Life's Myriad Shapes

Darwin Still Rules, but Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift

Fast-Reproducing Microbes Provide a Window on Natural Selection

--Julie