In the continual arms race between parasites and their hosts, innovation was thought to be the key to a successful attack or defense that one-ups the competition. But sometimes, as in the corporate world, outright theft can be a quicker way to achieve dominance. University of California, Berkeley biologists have shown that several species of fruit fly have stolen a successful defense from bacteria to survive predation by parasitic wasps, which in some flies can turn half of all fly larvae into surrogate wombs for baby wasps -; a gruesome fate that inspired the creature in the 1979 movie "Alien.
" Bacteria and other microbes are famous for stealing genes from other microbes or viruses; this so-called horizontal gene transfer is the source of troublesome antibiotic resistance among disease-causing microbes. But it's thought to be less common in multicellular organisms, such as insects and humans. Understanding how common it is in animals and how these genes are co-opted and shared can help scientists understand the evolution of animal immune defenses and could point the way to human therapies to fight parasitic or infectious diseases or cancer, itself a kind of parasite.
It's a model for understanding how immune systems evolve, including our immune system, which also contains horizontally transferred genes." Noah Whiteman, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and of integrative biology and director of the campus's Essig Museum of Entomology Last year, the research.