Researchers find a gene that lets bacteria kill all male flies

Researchers find a gene that lets bacteria kill all male flies

  • May 4, 2018
Table of Contents

Researchers find a gene that lets bacteria kill all male flies

A number of bacteria that infect insects have a simple and brutal way of increasing their transmission: they kill off all the male progeny of the females that they infect. There’s actually some evolutionary logic to this. The bacteria can get transmitted to the eggs of the females they infect but can’t get carried along on the sperm.

That makes the male offspring a problem: they can’t spread the bacteria further, and they’ll compete with the females for food. Better to kill them off, then, just to ensure that never becomes a problem.

Source: arstechnica.com

Tags :
Share :
comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts

Exabytes in a Test Tube: The Case for DNA Data Storage

Exabytes in a Test Tube: The Case for DNA Data Storage

Read More
Learning to Speak Shrub

Learning to Speak Shrub

A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That’s because Karban’s cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent chemical alarms into the air.

Read More
New form of DNA discovered inside living human cells

New form of DNA discovered inside living human cells

A newDNAstructure inside human cells known asthe “i-motif”, has been identified by scientists. This form resembles a twisted “knot” of DNA, instead of the well-known double helix first described by James Watson and Francis Crick.

Read More