Natural GMOs Part 210. Without genes pilfered from bacteria, ticks would drop dead of the Lyme disease they carry - The Washington Post

The blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis), the primary vector for Lyme disease in the central and eastern United States. Image Source A New View on Lyme Disease: Rodents Hold the Key to Annual Risk. Gross L, PLoS Biology Vol. 4/6/2006, e182. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040182

The deer tick is a tiny rascal that's easily flicked away with a finger. And yet you would be wise to fear it.

One bite could infect humans with Lyme disease, a debilitating illness that can lead to everything from headaches to neurological disorders if left untreated. Lyme is often left untreated because its symptoms are similar to the flu at the onset, and is often misdiagnosed by doctors.

But a recent discovery could one day make deer ticks themselves vulnerable to the disease they transmit. Researchers seeking to discover how genes evolve inside bacteria stumbled across something they had not seen before: They found that the genes they thought were only present in bacteria were also inside more complex life forms — animals such as ticks and mites....

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Transferred interbacterial antagonism genes augment eukaryotic innate immune function

Seemay Chou, Matthew D. Daugherty, S. Brook Peterson,Jacob Biboy, Youyun Yang, Brandon L. Jutras,Lillian K. Fritz-Laylin, Michael A. Ferrin,Brittany N. Harding,Christine Jacobs-Wagner, X. Frank Yang,Waldemar Vollmer,Harmit S. Malik and Joseph D. Mougous

Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13965

Received 06 August 2014 Accepted 13 October 2014 Published online 24 November 2014

Horizontal gene transfer allows organisms to rapidly acquire adaptive traits. Although documented instances of horizontal gene transfer from bacteria to eukaryotes remain rare, bacteria represent a rich source of new functions potentially available for co-option. One benefit that genes of bacterial origin could provide to eukaryotes is the capacity to produce antibacterials, which have evolved in prokaryotes as the result of eons of interbacterial competition. The type VI secretion amidase effector (Tae) proteins are potent bacteriocidal enzymes that degrade the cell wall when delivered into competing bacterial cells by the type VI secretion system3. Here we show that tae genes have been transferred to eukaryotes on at least six occasions, and that the resulting domesticated amidase effector (dae) genes have been preserved for hundreds of millions of years through purifying selection. 

We show that the dae genes acquired eukaryotic secretion signals, are expressed within recipient organisms, and encode active antibacterial toxins that possess substrate specificity matching extant Tae proteins of the same lineage. Finally, we show that a dae gene in the deer tick Ixodes scapularis limits proliferation of Borrelia burgdorferi, the aetiologic agent of Lyme disease. Our work demonstrates that a family of horizontally acquired toxins honed to mediate interbacterial antagonism confers previously undescribed antibacterial capacity to eukaryotes. We speculate that the selective pressure imposed by competition between bacteria has produced a reservoir of genes encoding diverse antimicrobial functions that are tailored for co-option by eukaryotic innate immune systems.