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

Did plants cause one of Earth’s great extinctions?

Did plants cause one of Earth’s great extinctions?

Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.

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

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

Read More
The Ocean Cleanup’s Machine Is About to Set Sail

The Ocean Cleanup’s Machine Is About to Set Sail

Six years ago, the technology was only an idea presented at a TEDx talk. Boyan Slat, the 18-year-old presenter, had learned that cleaning up the tiny particles of plastic in the ocean could take nearly 80,000 years. Because of the volume of plastic spread through the water, and because it is constantly moving with currents, trying to chase it with nets would be a losing proposition.

Read More