German researchers trace evolution of bacterial insecticides
ドイツの研究チーム、細菌が作る殺虫物質の進化を解明科学・技術
- Country:
- 🇩🇪 Germany
- Voice:
- 🇬🇧 Sophie
英語本文
Researchers in Marburg, Germany, have identified 49 distinct compounds in a study of how bacterial insecticides called GameXPeptides evolved. The team at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology and the University of Marburg found that natural selection, genetic drift and biased gene recombination together shaped the diversity of these peptides.
Bacterial enzyme systems assemble the peptides from amino acids. The GxpS system has five modules, and exchanges of gene segments occurred preferentially between similar modules. To reconstruct an ancestral enzyme, the researchers restored about 15,000 DNA base pairs and expressed the gene in Escherichia coli. Independent bacterial lineages sometimes produced similar or identical peptides.
Experiments involving four insect species found that different peptide variants killed them with different efficiencies. The bacteria Xenorhabdus and Photorhabdus live in the guts of nematodes that infect insect larvae. This is basic research into the compounds and their evolution; developing new antibiotics remains a possible future application of the work.