Monday, January 23, 2017

BacterioFiles 283 - Phages Furnish Photosynthetic Fortifications

Nostoc
By YAMAMAYA, CC BY-SA 3.0
This episode: Viruses infecting photosynthetic bacteria could transfer immunity to other viruses between their hosts!
Download Episode (6.8 MB, 7.4 minutes)

Show notes:
News item

Journal Paper:
Chénard C, Wirth JF, Suttle CA. 2016. Viruses Infecting a Freshwater Filamentous Cyanobacterium (Nostoc sp.) Encode a Functional CRISPR Array and a Proteobacterial DNA Polymerase B. mBio 7:e00667-16.

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    2 comments:

    1. The bacterial world is amazing as it is terrifying. Transferal of immunity like this is how many bacteria I'm sure survived as long as they did. In the past myself and some colleges did a research on E.Coli in water samples across the county; we tested the antibiotic resistance of those water sample E.Coli and found that there was some E.Coli in a problematic region that showed high resistance to a lot of antibiotics. Thankfully these strands where not pathogenic.. however due to the horizontal gene transfer it was found that some strains of Pathogenic E.coli did end up with this resistance.
      Regardless; it's still rather fascinating how these microorganisms can share so much among one another.

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      Replies
      1. Agreed, any potential combination of microbial genes has the possibility to happen naturally sometime somewhere... good to keep in mind.

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