Virus learns how to produce spider venom

[AnotherFairportfan]

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Biotechnologists have discovered some horrifying new consequences of lateral gene transfer: a virus that started making the toxin from black widow spider venom, all by itself. This might be the single combination humanity needed least. No matter what the permutation, viruses plus black widows add up to a whole lot of nope. It’s even less comforting that the virus acquired the ability to make the black widow toxin all on its own.

 
Not quite as bad as it sounds, though.
 
Full article

[TazManiac]

Bah, there’s a lot more under the Sun that even I think of in my own Philosophy... Anyway; Black Widow Spiders? Just pick em up and crunch em... tasty.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

That article is both grossly misleading and blatant fearmongering. At no point did the phage actually gain the ability to produce spider venom, it simply incorporated some of those genes into copying itself, because phages are sloppy that way.

Genes don't work that way, sorry to disappoint anyone who had hoped to become a super-mutant or anthropomorphic through gene splicing.

[Alkarii]

Humans are already anthropomorphic, actually. That word means something is shaped like a human.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Humans are already anthropomorphic, actually. That word means something is shaped like a human.

Sorry, using shorthand for anthropomorphic animals in this context.

[Dave]

That article is both grossly misleading and blatant fearmongering. At no point did the phage actually gain the ability to produce spider venom, it simply incorporated some of those genes into copying itself, because phages are sloppy that way.

Genes don't work that way, sorry to disappoint anyone who had hoped to become a super-mutant or anthropomorphic through gene splicing.

The article does seem to say that the latrotoxin gene in the phage is actually being transcribed, though... a protein is being manufactured. It may well not be functional as a toxin, though, due to a lack of subsequent processing steps.

It is rather amazing, though, how easily and frequently gene sequences do manage to jump between very different types of organisms. The "species barrier" is far from being a hard-and-fast thing! Bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, fungi, plants, and animals have been engaged in "GMO" games of their own, far longer than humans have even existed.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

That article is both grossly misleading and blatant fearmongering. At no point did the phage actually gain the ability to produce spider venom, it simply incorporated some of those genes into copying itself, because phages are sloppy that way.

Genes don't work that way, sorry to disappoint anyone who had hoped to become a super-mutant or anthropomorphic through gene splicing.

The article does seem to say that the latrotoxin gene in the phage is actually being transcribed, though... a protein is being manufactured. It may well not be functional as a toxin, though, due to a lack of subsequent processing steps.

It is rather amazing, though, how easily and frequently gene sequences do manage to jump between very different types of organisms. The "species barrier" is far from being a hard-and-fast thing! Bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, fungi, plants, and animals have been engaged in "GMO" games of their own, far longer than humans have even existed.

Hell, grafting is little more than primitive GMO and hoping for a specific result in shotgun fashion instead of selecting the precise mutation you want. Never did understand all the fearmongering around GMO. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years with selective crossbreeding, cross-pollination, and other techniques. Corn, as we know it today, is a geneticlly modified organism. It started out as Maize, and over time, was cross-bred to be larger and higher yield and whatnot. Peanuts literally did not exist until they got cross-bred from a couple of different species. Modern technology just makes it marginally less random.

What the article is looking at is a type of 'phage' which lives on a certain type of bacteria which lives on spiders. When you get down to that level, the phage literally eats genes. That is what it consumes to produce energy. Sometimes it is rather sloppy about what it consumes and what it passes along. PART of a gene is there, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything other than that was what the phage had for its last meal. It's rather like looking at animal scat, really.

[Warrl]

It is rather amazing, though, how easily and frequently gene sequences do manage to jump between very different types of organisms. The "species barrier" is far from being a hard-and-fast thing! Bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, fungi, plants, and animals have been engaged in "GMO" games of their own, far longer than humans have even existed.

We are the product of a couple billion years of (among other things) viruses picking up DNA in one place, getting it replicated, and dropping it somewhere else - often in a different species.

As long as it happens naturally and more or less randomly, it's okay, everything is great. It is, after all, "organic".

If a human carefully designs a virus to pick up a specific gene from one species and drop it in a specific spot in a chosen other species - oh no! Genetically Modified Organism! How can we take the risk that it might kill us all???

(People are weird sometimes....)

[Dave]

We are the product of a couple billion years of (among other things) viruses picking up DNA in one place, getting it replicated, and dropping it somewhere else - often in a different species.

As long as it happens naturally and more or less randomly, it's okay, everything is great. It is, after all, "organic".

If a human carefully designs a virus to pick up a specific gene from one species and drop it in a specific spot in a chosen other species - oh no! Genetically Modified Organism! How can we take the risk that it might kill us all???

(People are weird sometimes....)

Yes, we are.

One of the little facts that I ran into years ago, and found particularly fascinating, is that we probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for retroviruses like HIV.

The human genome (and, in fact, that of other placental mammals) contains numerous relict segments of retrovirus DNA, dating back many millions of years. Most of these are nonfunctional - they've been sufficiently damaged by mutations that knocked out critical genes. However, some segments of these "endogenous retroviruses" are active in humans.

Retroviruses are notorious for suppressing the immune system - that's how they manage to survive and spread in the human body. One still-active segment of retroviral DNA appears to do just that - it selectively suppresses immune-system reactions in the placenta, and keeps the mother's body from rejecting the (immunologically-distinct) child.

If it weren't for that retrovirus, placental mammals might never have evolved - we might have been marsupials, or even monotremes.

[TazManiac]

I have little need for the Mouse growing the Human Ear on it's back (at this time anyway), but the things folks are doing w/ the Glow-in-the-Dark Jellyfish stuff is intriguing.

btw- the GMO Concern has a certain thing about it to be wary of- the Intent. 'Mother Nature' makes all kinds of changes and combinations and most of them don't pan out and/or take a very long time (most of the time) to take root and influence the bigger picture.

Pee-Pol on the other hand can hurry up the process, add very strange combinations to the mix (chemical luminescence in a Land Mammal wouldn't likely have been a evolutionary 'plus' to be handed down to subsequent generations...), and folks w/ the Lab Coats on are often not calling the shots- esp when a profit is to be made.

I'm a bit disappointed, having grown up through the 60s & 70s, that I can't expect to gain superpowers via an Irradiated Spider Bite or through Exposure to Cosmic Rays or Jumping into the Runaway Atomic Pile to shut down a China Syndrome type situation.

I am sad.

[Catawampus]

Hell, grafting is little more than primitive GMO and hoping for a specific result in shotgun fashion instead of selecting the precise mutation you want. Never did understand all the fearmongering around GMO. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years with selective crossbreeding, cross-pollination, and other techniques. Corn, as we know it today, is a geneticlly modified organism. It started out as Maize, and over time, was cross-bred to be larger and higher yield and whatnot. Peanuts literally did not exist until they got cross-bred from a couple of different species. Modern technology just makes it marginally less random.

Yeah, much of the hysteria around GMOs is just that: hysteria. I've actually been involved in some of that sort of work, and can say with certainty that a good deal of what is written about the dangers of genetic engineering is totally ridiculous. However, the wariness is not all unjustified. There are some aspects of modern gene splicing that aren't as much of a problem with older, more “traditional” version such as grafting or breeding hybrids.

1) With the older techniques, you mostly had to work with closely related species. You could mate a lion with a tiger or grow an apple on an orange tree, but you couldn't cross a lion with an apple and expect to get anything other than an annoyed lion and a lot of applesauce.

When it comes to modern genetic manipulation, though, you can mix kingdoms and phyla rather than just species much more easily. That lets you accomplish far greater things, but also means that the resulting organisms can have much more unexpected things going on inside of them. Sometimes proteins from one species don't mix in a very nice way with proteins from a radically different one. And sometimes the discovery of those unexpected products can be rather unpleasant.

So while the older techniques were much more blind and along the lines of, “Hey, let's see if we can mix these together and see what happens!”, newer techniques are more likely to have more spectacularly disastrous results.

2) The greater freedom to pick and choose specific genetic sequences means that there is more room for abuse of genetic modification. There is now much greater potential for all sorts of nasty bioweapons. On the plus side, there's also more potential for all sorts of counters to all sorts of nasty bioweapons, whether those bioweapons be natural or artificial.

3) The practices of companies involved in GMO research or production. Companies can be less than fully transparent about things that consumers really ought to know about. Companies can also be overbearing and arrogant and bullying. To me, this sort of thing actually seems to be the most valid concern of the anti-GMO crowd, as far as actual events that have occurred. Many companies involved in marketing GMOs have acted atrociously over the years. This isn't really a problem with GMOs themselves, per se, but rather is a problem with society's handling of the new technology. Sensible legislation (if such a thing is possible), responsible regulation, and well-informed consumers ought to be able to work out the worst of that. Or else we'll muck the whole thing up totally and spend the next century flailing about wildly. Given the history of humankind's handling of innovations, I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance either way.

(chemical luminescence in a Land Mammal wouldn't likely have been a evolutionary 'plus' to be handed down to subsequent generations...)

It wouldn't have to be a plus, just so long as it wasn't a burden to reproduction. Heck, it might even be a trait that's actively harmful to the long-term survival of the individual so long as it makes the critter look sexy enough for long enough.

[Dave]

One rather neat GMO hack I've read of, recently:

Scientists have isolate a genre from wheat. It enables wheat to make an enzyme called oxalate oxidase. This can detoxify oxalic acid.

America used to have huge forests of chestnut trees... they were one of the primary trees in old-growth forests. Beautiful, magestic, their rot-resistant wood was one of the primary building materials in Colonial days, and their nuts are valuable food for both humans and forest animals. Almost all gone now, wiped out by a fungus (chestnut blight) accidentally imported from Europe. Scientists have been working to breed blight-resistant strains by crossing American chestnuts with blight-resistant Chinese species, but these won't be the same as the originals.

It turns out that the chestnut blight fungus uses oxalic acid to attack and invade the tree... the acid is a toxin which breaks down the cell walls in the wood.

By transplanting the oxalic oxidase gene into tissue from wheat into a surviving American chestnut, scientists have created a tree which is immune to the fungus... it can't attack the tree successfully. The fungus may live on the bark, harmlessly, but can't invade the inner tissues... it's no longer a successful pathogen.

Since this is a gene found in a very common food product, humans have been consuming the stuff for thousands of years... the chance of it affecting the edibility of chestnuts is minute. They're testing now to make sure that other animals which eat chestnuts, or the leaves and wood from the tree aren't affected adversely, but as far as I know there have been no problems noted.

So, in a few years it may be possible to start replanting American chestnuts throughout the country... an original American strain, not cross-bred with Chinese chestnut species. Just one little gene added, from wheat, to provide a very selective defense against disease.

[Dave]

As to the risks of GM, I agree... they do exist. Each case needs to be looked at individually. For example, transplanting genes for proteins which have a high allergenic potential (say, peanut) into other species seems like a really bad ideas.

The issues of corporations acting badly (out of short-sighted greed, profit motive, or simply not-thinking-this-through) is a valid concern, and it isn't just limited to generic engineering. Nor is it limited to corporations. The "new plagues" of the last century (HIV, Ebola, Marburg, Lyme, swine and bird flu, Zika) are all of natural origin, zoonotic (their natural hosts are non-human animal species), introduced to the human population due largely to increased population pressure which pushes the human populations into new areas and creates more contact between humans and animals. Just ordinary people, trying to live their lives and get by... having no idea that the animals they're hunting and killing for bush-meat, or living in the tree next to the house they just built, are carrying a virus that will be deady to humans.

With GMO, I think we've crossed the Rubicon already. Genetic modification knowledge and technology has just about reached the "available to any amateur scientist in his garage" stage, thanks to the development of CRISPR gene splicing. Regulation of large-scale commercial deployment of GMO into the food chain may be possible; preventing individuals from hacking gene sequences probably can't be.

[Warrl]

1) With the older techniques, you mostly had to work with closely related species. You could mate a lion with a tiger or grow an apple on an orange tree, but you couldn't cross a lion with an apple and expect to get anything other than an annoyed lion and a lot of applesauce.

When it comes to modern genetic manipulation, though, you can mix kingdoms and phyla rather than just species much more easily.

Which is what viruses in the wild sometimes do. In fact, the original main technique of modern genetic manipulation was to let viruses do it, and then examine the resulting DNA rather than wait for an organism to mature enough that we could examine it. After which we started figuring out how to be selective on exactly which genes the viruses would pick up and where they would be dropped.

So while the older techniques were much more blind and along the lines of, “Hey, let's see if we can mix these together and see what happens!”, newer techniques are more likely to have more spectacularly disastrous results.

And it's not like the labs produce a batch of GMO seeds without verifying that they are modified in the intended way, and then throw it out into the wild without any testing. Wild random gene transcription, by definition, does all its verification and testing in the wild. So while the deliberate manipulation might be more likely to initially produce a bad result, it's less likely that the bad result will be in the wild.

[Typeminer]

So, in a few years it may be possible to start replanting American chestnuts throughout the country... an original American strain, not cross-bred with Chinese chestnut species. Just one little gene added, from wheat, to provide a very selective defense against disease.

Actually, I was surprised to learn a few years ago that a lot of the old chestnut roots are still alive in local areas that are still forested. You can still find saplings coming up from them, and they grow to maybe 10 feet in height and a diameter of an inch or two before the blight nails them. There's also a local test farm for new chestnut hybrids. If 1 in 5 makes it, they will consider it a great success. Not sure how that is panning out, though.

When I was in the Scouts (latter half of the '60s), there were still a lot of dead chestnuts standing in the mountains in southwestern Pennsylvania. The old folks never got over losing them; they were the greatest trees in the land. Versatile as redwood, plentiful, easy to work, beautiful wood, and the best of the treenuts for humans, deer, and squirrels alike. I'd love to see them make a comeback.

I work in research publishing. I don't really understand molecular biology, but I process enough of it to recognize my ignorance. Most people, I think, have no idea that they have no idea. I'm ambivalent about genetic recombination. The panic is way overblown, but I don't think it's a particularly good idea to do industrial GMO monocropping so you can drench a whole watershed with herbicide that's supposed to kill everything but the monocrop. That kind of agriculture worries me more than editing the RNA sequences in the soybeans.

And I agree that gene recombination technology is about at the point where lots of people will be doing it soon. Not as accessible as baking your own bread, but not more inaccessible than putting together a machine shop with used equipment in the garage.

And they have inserted green fluorescent protein into cats. So the kittens glow green under ultraviolet light. Not sure that does the cats any good, though.

[Dave]

The panic is way overblown, but I don't think it's a particularly good idea to do industrial GMO monocropping so you can drench a whole watershed with herbicide that's supposed to kill everything but the monocrop. That kind of agriculture worries me more than editing the RNA sequences in the soybeans.

I very much agree. The massive loss of genetic diversity, and the potential for a new disease to rip through millions of acres of monocrop in a matter of months, really does give me the willies.

That's one big reason I tend to buy organic when I can... not because I think it's necessarily healthier for me in the short term, but because I think it's healthier for human agricultural practices in the long run. Diversity is good for us.

And I agree that gene recombination technology is about at the point where lots of people will be doing it soon. Not as accessible as baking your own bread, but not more inaccessible than putting together a machine shop with used equipment in the garage.

And they have inserted green fluorescent protein into cats. So the kittens glow green under ultraviolet light. Not sure that does the cats any good, though.

It won't, at least, be much of a disadvantage, at least not until The Brain teaches the rest of the mice how to make UV lamps.

[Typeminer]

It won't, at least, be much of a disadvantage, at least not until The Brain teaches the rest of the mice how to make UV lamps.

What could go wrong?

Also, they now have genes for red, green, yellow, and cyan fluorescent proteins. Not sure what's holding up the blacklight tattooing.

[Dave]

Oh, wonderful. Now I have to keep my eyes peeled for glowing, paisley, chimeric mice escaping from some backyard Burbank's CRISPR lab.