[echelon]

They found a bacteria with extra-genomic material that isn't in the shape of a plasmid (circular DNA that is a feature of bacterial transfection and gene transfer).

They believe it came from archean rather than bacterial sources. (Not really related, but many of our genes, and indeed one of our critical organelles, are also archea-derived, ie. the mitochondria.)

The genomic payload is large and comes with replication machinery (it might be a useful tool!)

Plasmids hold a much smaller payload than these units, and they're difficult to work with. Borgs are huge. If we can turn them into transfection toolkits, we can do larger scale genomic experiments much faster. That's extremely exciting.

Much of biochemistry research and understanding is done in bacteria. They're extremely useful little computers. We just discovered an extremely useful way to hack them.

In the wild, the gene payload codes for novel methane metabolic pathways. This also is of great interest. Not only for applicability to climate science, but also the natural ability to swap out or augment bacterial metabolism. Imagine all of the novel things you might swap in instead.

Who knows. These might wind up in eukaryotic cells too!

[twic]

Plasmids are an absolute doddle to work with. Borgs are huge, which makes them a nightmare to work with.

I used to work with bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) that were ~100 kb in size, and those were already a pain. You have to be really delicate when preparing the DNA because it's so easy to shear. You can't separate it on a normal gel, you have to use PFGE. Borgs will be even worse.

Borgs being bigger means you can fit more interesting stuff into them. But i don't know to what extent that is a constraint at the moment. 100 kb is already a lot of space for bacteria!

Bacteria and eukaryotes are different enough that we won't find borgs themselves in eukaryotes, and if you put a borg into a eukaryote, it wouldn't replicate. However, they could be used as a vector for constructing human artificial chromosomes - you need something that replicates in working organism, like bacteria or yeast, so you can do the molecular biology, and you add the necessary human sequences to that:

https://www.nature.com/articles/gt2009102

At the moment, the biggest vectors we have are yeast artificial chromosomes, which i think top out at ~1 Mb.

But again, what are you going to do that needs that much space? A typical human gene is a few tens of kb; 40 kb is big (there are megabase freaks, but they are very rare). And that's for the gene, introns and all - often you can use a cDNA which is a fraction of the size.

[dnautics]

Noncircular extragenomic dna in bacteria isn't a new thing, for example, the marine algae cyanothece has linear DNA, and iirc it is important in regulating day/night cycles for nitrogen fixation (which is oxygen sensitive)

[jl6]

I didn’t quite get the climate science impact. Is the suggestion that these borgs currently are “digesting” methane, and therefore helping reduce the amount of methane released to the atmosphere? Is there a suggestion that we might augment them to “digest” CO2 too?

[developer93]

Methane is a more harmful greenhouse gas than CO2

[bigbillheck]

> (Not really related, but many of our genes, and indeed one of our critical organelles, are also archea-derived, ie. the mitochondria.)

Mitochondria are related to Rickettsia, which is a bacteria.

[aaronblohowiak]

Fantastically written summary, thank you!!

[jkhdigital]

Wild stuff. Here's my current mental analogical model:

bacterium : animal :: computer : botnet

[echelon]

A better analogy might be

bacterium : animal :: raspberry pi : kubernetes cluster

[canadianfella]

What do you mean?

[echelon]

You can often tell someone's age by whether or not they know analogies in this format. It used to be a staple of standardized testing on logical deduction.

A : B :: C : D

Is read as

A is to B as C is to D. The reader is meant to understand the relationship between A and B and how it's similar to the relationship between C and D.

An easy one might be,

basketball : hoop :: hockey puck : net

But they can get quite challenging. And with multiple choice answers present in standardized testing, you often have to understand the complex relationships between many abstract concepts, and evaluate that the abstractions are of a similar type or degree.

They're actually kind of fun.

Here's an example taken from [1] (the source also has excellent discussion as to why they were removed) :

PALTRY : SIGNIFICANCE ::

  A. redundant : discussion
  B. austere : landscape
  C. opulent : wealth
  D. oblique : familiarity
  E. banal : originality

Pick the correct answer A-E.

[1] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-w...

[drdeca]

Is this an age thing?

I’ve been surprised a number of times by people not being familiar with this format, but they were only a year or 2 younger than me. (I’m 25)

It’s a nice format for thinking about things, so if people stopped learning it, that seems unfortunate to me.

[Taniwha]

May also be an American thing (at least the whole spending a lot of time on analogies for SAT testing thing)

[sellyme]

For what it's worth I'm a 25-year-old Australian who never encountered this specific syntax in schooling (it was always phrased "as <x> is to what?"), but am still very familiar with it from general interactions online.

It's probably just a matter of how strongly your immediate social circle feels about formal logic.

[Sharlin]

As one data point, we never did these sort of analogy puzzles in school in Finland (but we don't have standardized multiple-choice testing either). I'm only familiar with the concept and format as a part of the general anglosphere meme complex that you naturally get exposed to if you spend time on the internet.

[XaspR8d]

I just assume I'm overly familiar with it as someone who was a natural test-taker. (Early 30s)