A team of researchers coordinated by experts from the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington has discovered that some animals “appropriate” the toxins that certain bacteria naturally produce. In this way, they are able to protect themselves from other microorganisms.
In essence, the genes involved in the production of these compounds, which bacteria inject into the cells of their microscopic rivals to kill them, are passed from bacteria to animals through a mechanism called horizontal gene transfer.
In fact, they are permanently incorporated into your genome. In an article published in the journal Nature , the scientists emphasize that although this process is quite common in microbes, until now it has hardly been observed between bacteria and more complex organisms.
Animals that benefit from this tactic include, for example, some species of ticks and mites. The researchers point out that this capacity could be used to study the incidence of some diseases caused by bacteria, such as Lyme disease, which affects the organs, a pathology that is precisely transmitted by the aforementioned ticks.
Photo: Matt Pinski / University of Washington
