Article based off publication by Elizabeth Pennisi in association with ScienceMag.org and research by Jill Banfield at The University of California, Berkeley
Photo by Kenneth Carpina from Pexels
When most people hear the term DNA, they may tend to imagine the typical double-helix structure that exists within a cell’s nucleus and mitochondria; the genetic code that makes up all life. This is basic cell structure as most individuals learn in grade school. While it may seem like modern science has a firm understanding of these types of principles, new discoveries are being made every day that only bring more questions. One such discovery was recently made by a University of California, Berkeley, geomicrobiologist researcher named Jill Banfield and her team, and they gave it a fantastic name.
The discovery in question is a sequence of extrachromosomal DNA, a genome, and they are being called “borgs”. Extrachromosomal DNA is DNA that exists anywhere outside of a cell’s chromosome, including the cell body. Chromosomes reside within a cell’s nucleus, and are comprised of DNA, so extrachromosomal elements that exist outside the nucleus of a cell are far and few for complex examples. The discovery arose from research being conducted by Jill Banfield in her backyard, regarding viruses infecting archaea. She accidentally stumbled across a gene-filled DNA element in mud samples that contained millions of base pairs, with some of the genes being novel (brand-new), and some being easily recognizable (already discovered). This is significantly larger than any other extrachromosomal DNA elements ever discovered, and far more complex.
Why does this discovery matter? This sequence is unlike anything ever seen to occur in nature, which is always big news for the scientific community. While they have their theories, researchers aren’t quite sure where these sequences came from. These theories range from some sort of symbiosis with an organism called a methanopereden, to viruses being responsible for the strange sequence. This type of work is directly responsible for answering many important biological questions; like, how life arose on our planet, where we might expect to find life elsewhere in the universe, and what we can expect it to look like. It remains ever-clear that humanity has much to learn.
Original Scientific Article: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.10.451761v1
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