The Role of DNA in the Evolution of Life

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The genetic context in which those transfers happen, the environmental context, whether that bit of DNA is going to be useful or just selected out, obviously matters a lot. And my impression is that not only can little bits of DNA get shared around, but they could even discover new uses for them when they're in a different kind of cell. So that explains in part why organisms that are closer to each other, both in terms of their genetics, sequence similarity and environment tend to exchange more frequently.

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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