Natural GMOs Part 156. Genes jump from snakes to cows – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The study by the Adelaide and Flinders Universities and the South Australian Museum suggests a quarter of a cow’s genetic makeup originated in reptiles.

The peer-reviewed research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA.

The head of Molecular and Biomedical Science at the University of Adelaide, Professor David Adelson, led the project and says it involved comparing dozens of DNA sequences from different species.

“There was an observation backs in the ’80s that snakes and cows shared a segment of DNA that looked to be quite similar in sequence and that was found to be a repetitive sequence,” he said.

“We basically went and scoured all of the databases for sequence, and did sequencing of our own across some species where there was no available information, and put all of that together.”

Professor Adelson says the DNA sequence shared by cows and reptiles is known as Bov-B.

He says it works as a retrotransposon – a genetic element with the ability to replicate itself.

“It cuts and pastes itself within the genome and amplifies itself,” he said.

“The difference between a retrotransposon and a retrovirus is a retrotransposon has no way of making an infectious particle, so it’s a bit of a mystery how it gets from species to another unless it’s hitchhiking as part of another virus, and that’s a very difficult thing to actually catch it in the act of doing.”

He says the Bov-B sequence could have been carried over by ticks but the precise mechanism remains a mystery.

“We have very clear evidence ticks that feed on reptiles and mammals are very similar to each other,” he said.

“It’s pretty clear that nature has been shuffling bits of DNA between species for the last of couple of hundred million years at least to the extent that the cow, 25 per cent of its genome we can show that it’s there only because of an element that was transmitted in, probably from a reptile.

“It’s naturally genetically modified.”…

2013-01-06 00:45:43

Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2013/01/natural-gmos-part-156-genes-jump-from.html