What is it about?
Bdelloid rotifers are leach-like microbial animals that have an amazing ability to survive freezing and other stresses. Little was known about their mechanism of freezing tolerance. Here I show that rotifers living in an alga patch in an Antarctic penguin colony have a family of genes that make ice-binding proteins (IBPs) that are thought to prevent freeze-thaw damage. Some of these rotifers quickly revived after being frozen for 24 years, implicating the ice-binding proteins in their survival. The IBPs closely resemble bacterial IBPs, indicating that they were acquired from bacteria by horizontal gene transfer.
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Why is it important?
Some microbial genes are considered "useful" because they allow organisms to survive in extreme environments. Useful genes have a tendency to show up in other organisms by a process called horizontal gene transfer. Such genes have great importance in the evolution of life, such as in the acquisition of photosynthesis by early bacteria and in the ability of plants to become established on land. The acquisition of bacterial genes for ice-binding proteins by bdelloid rotifers is a good example of this important process.
Perspectives
This research was made possible by publicly funded databases like NCBI and EMBL which put genetic data at the fingertips of researchers all over the world. These databases have greatly accelerated the pace of research in many fields, such as the evolution of life and the ability to predict protein structures.
James Raymond
University of Nevada Las Vegas
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A horizontally transferred bacterial gene aids the freezing tolerance of Antarctic bdelloid rotifers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2421910122.
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