Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Male-killing bacteria foiled by butterfly gene
A bacterium that slaughters all the male offspring of the insects it infects has been disarmed by a simple genetic change in a butterfly host within a few decades.
The speed with which this resistance evolved implies that male-killing may have appeared - and disappeared again - much more commonly than previously suspected.
The male-killing bacterium is a strain of Wolbachia, a widespread group of bacteria that are passed from one generation of hosts to the next in eggs, but not sperm.
Since males represent a "dead-end" for the bacteria, they have evolved a variety of tricks to favour females in their hosts, including converting males into females, inducing females to bear only female offspring and, rarely, simply killing male embryos.
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The above news release is based on the PLoS Biology open access paper "Evolution of Male-Killer Suppression in a Natural Population"
technorati tags: bacterium, males, offspring, genetic, change, butterfly, host, resistance, bacteria, eggs, sperm, females, embryos, killer, plos, biology, evolution, population, male
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