
Shellfish Gene: One piece of mobile DNA has spread itself throughout the oceans - drewvolpe
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-shellfish-gene/558131/?single_page=true
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jfarlow
Here's the sequence of the viral-like sequence they're calling _Steamer_ :

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KF319019](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KF319019)

We've got a bunch of similar viral-like DNA within our own genomes. And it
appears some of those sequences might actually 'fight' each other over
evolutionary time scales (dominant negative variants expressed from common
viral-promoters) - to the point where their infighting actually is in some
sense part of our own immune system's ability to ward off incoming viral
sequences in favor of existing sequences we're playing host to.

Lots more biology for us to learn!

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stevenwoo
As someone who likes to read about biology but only took a couple of classes
in high school - isn't there a trope that we used to not understand what 90%
of our DNA does and initially thought it was not used? The very simpler
counterargument in my opinion was we don't understand 90% of what our DNA
does.

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jfarlow
There is such a trope - I wouldn't call it accurate. We're learning a lot very
fast. But DNA (like most biology) is multi-modal and has roles at many
different scales - from the scale of milliseconds to cellular lifetimes, to
organismal lifetimes to species' lifetimes, from coding proteins, to
regulating what codes proteins, to physical space, to more.

There's a lot to learn, but we also know a lot. To me it seems more like a
nice middle ground right now - enough to get a truly solid toehold, but also
much more to go :)

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mopierotti
The title is a clever reference to Dawkins' book about evolutionary fitness:
The Selfish Gene
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene))

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Odenwaelder
An absolute must-read if you’re interested in biology.

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mannykannot
I did not follow why this is not considered some sort of virus - is it because
it is not a template for any proteins, or if it is, they do not get
synthesized, or they do but they don't assemble into a virus particle that
encapsulates the genetic material?

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Odenwaelder
Viruses have a hull, Transposons don’t. Viruses have evolved from transposons
by acquiring genes that allow them to form hulls.

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Taniwha
best subeditor ever!

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dang
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're hoping
for a bit better than that here.

