Woodstock CT Café

http://www.amazon.com/Microcosmos-Billion-Years-Microbial-Evolution/dp/0520210646/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339705878&sr=1-2-spell

John- I read this book a few months back. Interesting premise on how bacteria played a huge role in the evolutionary process-even purporting its symbiosis into the human genome giving.

LibDem, I stumbled across an example of an evolutionary step (less frequent than mutations) when I was working for the company that is engineering algae to make fuel. Normally we think of lower life forms evolving into higher life forms as described by Darwin. As an example of organisms exchanging genes, I discovered a paper that demonstrated that a cyanobacterium in the ocean acquired a gene that here -to-fore was thought to be only in eukaryotes, not prokaryote bacteria. The eukaryotic gene that was acquired by a bacterium encoded “actin” the major architectural of all eukaryotic cells that replicate and divide. I paid special attention to this discovery because my colleagues at Max-Planck and I were the first to sequence the human actin proteins and then the human beta-actin gene that I cloned. The protein sequence was published in 1980 and the gene sequence was published in 1985. One of the findings was that human “beta”-actin was the most highly conserved protein/gene in evolution of eukaryotes from yeasts to humans which says something about its fundament importance in higher life forms. The theory about how the functional gene got into this unique cyanobacterium is that the bug acquired the gene from a broken intestinal gut cell where the bacterium resided inside a marine invertebrate. This seems possible if all living animals have more bacteria in their bodies than their own number of cells (the NYTimes article linked above). So bacteria can sometimes (though rarely) further evolve from humans or other animals by acquiring their genes. For this to have been discovered, the cyanobacterium must have gained a growth advantage in its ecological niche by acquiring an actin gene; otherwise it would never have been found and would have eventually disappeared. Its survival is due to natural selection (Darwin).

In eukaryotes all intracellular and cellular movement is controlled by regulation of actin filament spacial organization and actin’s interaction with myosin (in muscle). The backbone of pili and podosomes is an actin filament.