The story of a butterfly that explains how species evolve.

on
People often wonder or rather doubt how new species are formed. Some people doubt the whole phenomenon of evolution because it's "a theory of evolution". However, in reality, evolution happens and we can find evidence of it in nature. Here, for instance, a species of butterfly in Amazon region was found to have evolved from the hybridization of two other species of butterflies. Interestingly, the descendants of all these three lineages of butterflies coexist in same geographical region and two of these occasionally mate with each other.
0

Towards safer GMOs

on


Genetically modified organisms possess unnatural functionalities. They are opposed due to many reasons, one of which is the chance that they might transfer their unnatural properties to other organisms which might cause environmental damage (?).
In an attempt to make GMOs more environmentally safer, people have been trying to develop organisms which can't grow outside lab and also are incapable of transferring their unnatural properties to other organisms.
Dr. Farren J. Isaac's group at Yale University had developed E. coli strains which had both of the above properties (Rovner et al.). In the paper published in 2013 they reported the strains created by them. These strains were modified in such a way that they needed synthetic amino acids (sAAs) for their survival. This makes them impossible to grow outside lab where these amino acids are not available. They also are more resistant to viruses which are main vectors for transfer of genes from one organism to another.
One might think that mutations in these bacteria could allow them to evade these limitations, but the researchers have modified the DNA at various positions making it almost impossible to escape. Even though the research has been successful only in one species of bacteria, it is a landmark for further similar work to be done in other organisms.


References:
Rovner,A.J., Haimovich, A.D., Katz, S.R., Li, Z., Grome, M.W., Gassaway, B.M., Amiram,M., Patel, J.R., Gallagher, R.R., Rinehart, J., et al. (2015). Recodedorganisms engineered to depend on synthetic amino acids. Nature advanceonline publication.


Comments

Post a Comment