January 26 2016: A parasite which kills thousands of people each year in sub-Saharan Africa arose comparatively recently, and its unusual sex life may lead to its own extinction, scientists have found. Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology in the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine have discovered that Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (T.b. gambiense), the main parasite that causes African Sleeping Sickness, has existed for thousands of years without reproducing sexually.
In a study, published today in the journal eLife, the researchers describe how sequencing the genomes of a large collection of T.b. gambiense has revealed that the parasite population today is made up entirely of asexual clones descended from a single ancestor.
Originally an animal parasite, T.b. gambiense ‘jumped’ into the human population within the last 10,000 years, at a time when livestock farming was developing in West Africa. The parasite is transmitted to humans by the bite of tsetse flies. Once in the bloodstream, T.b. gambiense can lie dormant for months or years without causing symptoms. Infected people suffer increasing damage to their nervous system, until they eventually lapse into a coma—the symptom which gives sleeping sickness its name.
The study’s lead author, Dr Willie Weir, said: “We’ve discovered that the parasite causing African Sleeping Sickness has existed for thousands of years without having sex and is now suffering the consequences of this strategy.
“An organism’s genetic blueprint is encoded in DNA packaged within structures called chromosomes. Most organisms have two copies of each chromosome and, through sexual reproduction, the DNA within the chromosomes can recombine randomly, in effect shuffling the deck of DNA cards.
“This process generates genetic diversity and, through natural selection, undesirable combinations and mutations are eliminated from the population, promoting long-term survival of the species.
“However, some organisms appear not to have sex at all. Evolutionary theory predicts that they should face extinction in the long-term and that a lack of sexual recombination should leave a characteristic genetic ‘signature’ in their DNA. While being theoretically predicted for almost 20 years, evidence for this signature has been elusive.”
The team’s research has shown that T.b. gambiense arose from a single individual parasite within the last ten millennia and, over time, mutations have accumulated on each chromosome copy.
Dr Annette MacLeod, senior author on the paper, added: “Because of a lack of sexual recombination, each copy has evolved independently of the other—a phenomenon called the ‘Meselson effect’. We have detected the first conclusive evidence of this effect in any organism at the genome-wide level.
“Essentially, the parasite compensates for its lack of sex by overwriting mutations through ‘copying and pasting’ DNA from one chromosome to another. However, our study suggests that this can only go some way to compensating for a lack of sex. Theoretically, this parasite species cannot survive indefinitely without sex and the predicted consequence of this is that it will become extinct in the long-term.
“In the near to medium term, though, identifying this weakness in the parasite could help researchers find ways to develop new forms of treatment for sleeping sickness which build on our findings. For example, the inability of individuals to share genetic information with each other could hamper the ability of the organism to develop resistance to multiple drugs.”
The paper, titled ‘Population genomics reveals the origin and asexual evolution of human infective trypanosomes’, is published in eLife and is available from http://elifesciences.org. The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust.
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anon (not verified)
Thu, 2016-01-28 16:34
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Zika virus in Brazil
There is a massive mosquito threat in Brazil. Health Minister Marcelo Castro said the country will mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading the Zika virus, suspected of causing birth defects. Despite those efforts, he reportedly said Tuesday, the battle is being lost.
The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as symptoms of infection by the virus are generally much milder than dengue’s. It didn't become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link to a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare condition in which babies are born with unusually small heads, causing lasting developmental problems.
Brazil has thrown everything it has against the mosquito-borne epidemics ravaging the country: education programs, planes full of insecticides, hundreds of thousands of health inspectors, and even the army. None of those have stopped the march of dengue and Zika, which are estimated to have infected nearly 3 million Brazilians—that is, more than one in 100—in 2015.
The jump in cases has prompted a global health scare, with several countries cautioning pregnant women against traveling to the 22 nations in the Americas where the virus has been reported. Genetically modified male mosquitoes were released in parts of Piracicaba city in Southern Brazil as a pilot project in April 2014. Studies have shown that these GM mosquitoes have reduced the wild mosquito population by 82% in areas covered under the pilot project.
Mutant mosquitoes to be deployed to stop Zika outbreak in Brazil (26/1/16) | Digital Jpurnal
El Salvador is advising all women in the country not to get pregnant until 2018. This small nation is already home to an epidemic of gang violence, pushing tens of thousands of its young people to flee north every year and stretching the government's resources. There seems little impediments available to stop human overpopulation! The drive to reproduce at whatever cost seems to be alive and well in humanity.
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