The Future of DNA Editing

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Tobias Barnica: I think ultimately that ability and maybe also playfulness in creating those new organisms will then enable us to go back and say, well, actually, now I understand much better about the rules in which I can combine those different elements. What does that tell me about what I think went on 2 billion years ago? Maybe sort of what you call it, learning by building, right? So you try to assemble the system, maybe use parts from our care and bacteria and eukaryotes to see how they cannot work together. Then end up with a much clearer understanding of the rules of life if you want and how they might have emerged ancestrally.

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played by histones, proteins that provide scaffolding for DNA to wrap around. Histones also appear in archaea (one of the other domains of life), but until recently there wasn't evidence for them in bacteria (the final of the three domains). Todays guest, Tobias Warnecke, is an author on a recent paper that claims to provide such evidence. We discuss this new result, as well as background questions of how cells evolved and what their current structure can teach us about their histories.

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Tobias Warnecke received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Bath. He is currently a Programme Leader and MRC Investigator at the London Institute of Medical Sciences. He is a co-author on A. Hochner et al. (2023), "Histone-Organized Chromatin in Bacteria."

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