Insects Harbor Over a Thousand Genes from Microbes, Which Help Them Survive

Published:21 Jul.2022 Source:Cell Press

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is fairly common between microbes. For example, bacteria use this mechanism to transmit antibiotic-resistance genes between species, but scientists more recently have been systematically looking at the phenomenon between insects and microbes or plants. "Previous studies have shown that HGT may have contributed to insect biodiversity, but nobody knew how large a role it plays in this process," says senior author Xing-Xing Shen, an evolutionary biologist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. "Since there are a lot of high-quality insect genomes available for our analysis, I thought that now is a good time to systematically investigate how prevalent HGT is in insects."

Shen's team at Zhejiang University started this project in collaboration with Antonis Rokas, an evolutionary biologist at Vanderbilt University by gathering 218 high-quality insect genome samples representing 11 of 19 species-rich orders of insects. With the data, they were able to draw an evolutionary tree, identify out-of-place genes that are more commonly found in non-animal genomes, and examine what factors contribute to the fate of HGT in insects. "There were HGT events everywhere we looked," says Shen. "However, we don't know whether these transfers of genes are beneficial to the insects, or even the functions for most of these genes," says Shen. He enlisted help from another expert -- Jianhua Huang, who studies insect gene functions at Zhejiang University.