I broadly agree that this is disastrous in the same sense that any invasive species is. But I take exception to this silly paragraph:
> He worries, for example, that the fluorescence-endowing genes from the escapees could end up being introduced in native fish with detrimental effects, perhaps making them more visible to predators. “It’s like a shot in the dark,” he says.
This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer.
On the other hand, if they can interbreed, then its likely their offspring will inherit glowing gene. But that would be merely a symptom of a problem: that of an invasive species genetics diluting those of a native species.
I love when people try to sound smarter than they are when talking to reporters. This is about the only thing that makes local news interesting when people think they'll be famous for being on TV of a local newscast.
In fact it seems backwards, if the glowing gene makes fish with it more visible to predators, shouldn't that select against it and make it less likely to gain a foothold in the environment? I would think local, camouflaged fish would benefit if their usual predators switched to the easier meal.
But before that, they need to survive until sexual maturity, which is well north of one year for most fish. They're not like mice which can reproduce inside of a month or three.
Right, also if glowing is in fact detrimental to the fitness of these native fish it will not spread in the population, even if it gets introduced. That would be diametrically opposed to how evolution works.
I can imagine a scenario where a glowing trait results in higher rates of reproduction because of sexual selection, resulting in large populations with the trait, even if the trait might increase mortality rates. Especially so if selection against the trait stems from something like learned behavior of predators.
Evolution doesn't mean that "bad" genes can't spread.
Thank you for reminding me of my favorite evo bio article of all time. In this particular species, females preferentially mate with the largest penis they can find, which applies strong selective pressure to hang dong. Unfortunately they're fish, so it's harder to swim if they're packing heat, making them more likely to get eaten by predators.
This is very rare in eucaryotes, and especially in larger and more complex animals. Eucaryotes work really hard to keep foreign DNA out and their own DNA in the nucleus. Here’s a good article about the only known case in fish and why it’s so unlikely[1].
So it's successful enough for the gene to spread to the whole population, but the whole population dies because the gene makes them easier to eat? Yeah I don't buy it either.
That can be a problem with endangered species and loss vigor, for instance by allowing garden flowers to cross with their wild neighbors, leading to increased numbers in the short term, but a population crash during the next drought, flood, or killing frost, because the garden variety is used to being coddled.
But something that makes them glow? That's going to be selected for or against every single day.
> On the other hand, if they can interbreed, then its likely their offspring will inherit glowing gene
Many domesticated species will revert back to their wild genes, or revert very closely. For example, when goldfish go ferrel they end up looking mostly like wild carp, except for some minor differences.
But goldfish aren't genetically engineered. They are deliberately inbred to to preserve recessive colors and patterns.
I think the big question is, what happens when glowing fish go ferrel? Are the glowing genes dominant? Are there non-glowing genes in the population?
I think it's incorrect to say they "revert to their wild genes". It's more a change in their outer appearance and traits while their genetics remains largely untouched (at least over only a few generations). Revert also implies the scaling back of features, but evolution is blind and there is no such thing as "better", merely things that do better in the environment as it is right now.
The glowing gene will be GFP which is a gene from jellyfish which has been introduced into these fish. So if any mutation suppresses or "turns off" the GFP gene, and GFP is maladative, then those fish will quickly outbreed their glowing siblings. The weird thing here, is the GFP gene will probably still be in their genome, it will just have a couple of errors that completely break it.
I haven't heard of the goldfish example so I can't comment much on that. Except to say that I wonder if the "reversion" is because goldfish are inter-breeding with wild carp? Maybe not, and it is a mix of strong selection pressure and epigenetics causing the phenotypic change.
> This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer.
I'm not sure that we know that yet. The science on horizontal gene transfer is in its nascent stages. Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer:
> [...] herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make [antifreezing proteins]. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.
> A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels.
The original article notes that the leading mechanistic hypothesis for this crossover involves genetic material hitching a ride during spawning:
> The remarkable gain of this advantageous gene was postulated to have occurred via HGT from foreign DNA attaching to sperm during spawning [2.], in a manner analogous to the technique of sperm-mediated gene transfer employed in laboratories to transfer genes to organisms, including fish [9.].
One might fairly extrapolate that the conditions necessary for such an unusual genetic exchange may be far more feasible for species in close proximity, rather than from a species of jellyfish limited to the west coast of North America.
It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only the frequency of such events (presumably quite low), but also the total number which have occurred over evolutionary history.
So I agree with you in broad strokes but I want to nit-pick some meanings here.
>It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only the frequency of such events (presumably quite low), but also the total number which have occurred over evolutionary history.
I think we have plentiful evidence for horizontal gene transfer, especially in bacteria (see "F-plasmids"). More relevant is all the endogenous retroviral sequences buried in our own DNA, all of which are effectively horizontal gene transfer between viruses and our ancestors. We know quite a bit about these random chunks of DNA so I am hesitant to call HGT either nascent or unlikely. Between seeing all the viral DNA and knowing roughly how fast mutations erase it, we can probably get a good estimate of how frequently it occurs.
But, I totally agree that this is all very unlikely. At least, HGT events are rare on human timescales. But they do seem to be somewhat common on evolutionary timescales! Sometimes I wish I could see our biosphere in 1000 years time. It would be a radically weird place.
I think that you missed my point. I was only speaking about animal-to-animal HGT, which was the essence of the :
> Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer
It was a response to your original statement:
> This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer.
I am aware of HGT within bacteria and viral domains. Science has done more to study those domains in part because the genomes are much smaller and are more plentiful. Additionally, for species within Kingdom Animalia, biologists have turned toward DNA Barcoding as an identifier rather than whole genome sequencing, which functionally limits the data available for investigation of such anomalies. Hence we really don't have good data on HGT between animal species.
This seems silly for another reason: these fish are genetically engineered to be fluorescent, which means that if you shine light on them at one frequency (typically UV-A light), they emit light at another frequency (red, green or blue). They are not luminescent, which is the spontaneous emission of light, like in fireflies. Lacking any UV light in the wild of nature, surely, they would hardly look any different from any ordinary fish.
Those two aren't 'transgenic' in the sense meant here (which is synonymous with 'genetically modified' not just 'hybrid'). But of course there are plenty of GM/GE plants that already escape from one field to another[1]. Animals are more novel, partly because we haven't been engineering them for as long.
In Korea genetically modified plants have been discovered near roadways and logistic centers, despite the cultivation of transgenic plants being illegal. IIRC they were imported as bulk foods and some fell off the truck(s).
Being against transgenic animals is a form of xenophobia - they have as much right to exist as older species. The additional genetic diversity is fantastic and a great chance to improve nature. If they are inferior they will die on their own, if they are better they will prosper, the most fair outcome. Nature isn't supposed to be a curated and fragile garden.
I'm sure this is only a harbinger of things to come. As genetic engineering becomes cheaper and more accessible, genetically modified animals will become the norm, to the dismay of people obsessed with genetic purity everywhere.
>Being against transgenic animals is a form of xenophobia - they have as much right to exist as older species. The additional genetic diversity is fantastic and a great chance to improve nature. If they are inferior they will die on their own, if they are better they will prosper, the most fair outcome. Nature isn't supposed to be a curated and fragile garden.
Not at all, it’s being concerned about the effects of releasing genetically engineered species into the wild, both purposely or accidentally. It’s not questioning “is it right/wrong because they are different genetically” but “is it ethical to potentially change the environments of other species without understanding the ramifications”.
That's an impressive level of hubris. I hope you're aware that the extent to which a gene can propogate is only loosely correlated with subjective metrics like "fitness" and "superior" traits on to it's host organism. Otherwise, we wouldn't have crippling genetic disorders around after nearly 4 billion years of evolution.
Also, can we please oh please not project this liberal meme of the "free market" on to Nature. Nature doesn't have "better" or "worse" ideas and it certainly doesn't have markets - at least till we came around.
Don't you know? Fact checkers sit on a secret stash of information that nobody else, including journalists, can access – and since both they and their sources are trustworthy, unbiased and uncompromisable they can relay this information to the rest of us so we can know what's true. It's amazing, really!
Curiosity about its glow and artificial origin aside, the most common fish in Brazil is the tilapia, which is of African origin. Whatever changes this new fish causes are likely to be a fraction of what that fish did.
Not to us humans perhaps, but fish have additional patterning that's only visible under UV light, so UV light might make up an important part of their vision.
Do they taste any different? Being glowy might be bad due to predators, but if they taste horrible to these predators, it could also act as a signal to leave them alone.
OTOH, if they taste good, I wonder if they'll become food for humans. A sushi that glows could be fun!
There's a lot of extra potential! Ever since the glowing mice videos (cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXM_WmwT2v4) I've wondered when glowing animals would get sold as pets.
Personally, I'd prefer a glowing cat (seriously! I love cats!)
I'd just want to make sure it doesn't impact the animal health or cause them any suffering. While I really want a cat that glows in the dark, I wouldn't want one that would suffer for my amusement.
Man, there's glowies everywhere these days. Reminds me of the accounts of frogs who end up being chemically gifted to sprout genital-bouquets down there due to human activity.
51 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 94.5 ms ] thread> He worries, for example, that the fluorescence-endowing genes from the escapees could end up being introduced in native fish with detrimental effects, perhaps making them more visible to predators. “It’s like a shot in the dark,” he says.
This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer.
On the other hand, if they can interbreed, then its likely their offspring will inherit glowing gene. But that would be merely a symptom of a problem: that of an invasive species genetics diluting those of a native species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebrafish#Reproduction
Evolution doesn't mean that "bad" genes can't spread.
Thank you for reminding me of my favorite evo bio article of all time. In this particular species, females preferentially mate with the largest penis they can find, which applies strong selective pressure to hang dong. Unfortunately they're fish, so it's harder to swim if they're packing heat, making them more likely to get eaten by predators.
[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/fulltext/S0168-9525(21)...
That can be a problem with endangered species and loss vigor, for instance by allowing garden flowers to cross with their wild neighbors, leading to increased numbers in the short term, but a population crash during the next drought, flood, or killing frost, because the garden variety is used to being coddled.
But something that makes them glow? That's going to be selected for or against every single day.
Many domesticated species will revert back to their wild genes, or revert very closely. For example, when goldfish go ferrel they end up looking mostly like wild carp, except for some minor differences.
But goldfish aren't genetically engineered. They are deliberately inbred to to preserve recessive colors and patterns.
I think the big question is, what happens when glowing fish go ferrel? Are the glowing genes dominant? Are there non-glowing genes in the population?
The glowing gene will be GFP which is a gene from jellyfish which has been introduced into these fish. So if any mutation suppresses or "turns off" the GFP gene, and GFP is maladative, then those fish will quickly outbreed their glowing siblings. The weird thing here, is the GFP gene will probably still be in their genome, it will just have a couple of errors that completely break it.
I haven't heard of the goldfish example so I can't comment much on that. Except to say that I wonder if the "reversion" is because goldfish are inter-breeding with wild carp? Maybe not, and it is a mix of strong selection pressure and epigenetics causing the phenotypic change.
The goldfish color disappeared within 2 generations, probably some breeding with others too => partially red fish within 1 generation
I'm not sure that we know that yet. The science on horizontal gene transfer is in its nascent stages. Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer:
> [...] herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make [antifreezing proteins]. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.
> A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels.
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/dna-jumps-between-animal-spec...
The original article notes that the leading mechanistic hypothesis for this crossover involves genetic material hitching a ride during spawning:
> The remarkable gain of this advantageous gene was postulated to have occurred via HGT from foreign DNA attaching to sperm during spawning [2.], in a manner analogous to the technique of sperm-mediated gene transfer employed in laboratories to transfer genes to organisms, including fish [9.].
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2021.02.006
One might fairly extrapolate that the conditions necessary for such an unusual genetic exchange may be far more feasible for species in close proximity, rather than from a species of jellyfish limited to the west coast of North America.
[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/325995-Aequorea-victoria
It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only the frequency of such events (presumably quite low), but also the total number which have occurred over evolutionary history.
>It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only the frequency of such events (presumably quite low), but also the total number which have occurred over evolutionary history.
I think we have plentiful evidence for horizontal gene transfer, especially in bacteria (see "F-plasmids"). More relevant is all the endogenous retroviral sequences buried in our own DNA, all of which are effectively horizontal gene transfer between viruses and our ancestors. We know quite a bit about these random chunks of DNA so I am hesitant to call HGT either nascent or unlikely. Between seeing all the viral DNA and knowing roughly how fast mutations erase it, we can probably get a good estimate of how frequently it occurs.
But, I totally agree that this is all very unlikely. At least, HGT events are rare on human timescales. But they do seem to be somewhat common on evolutionary timescales! Sometimes I wish I could see our biosphere in 1000 years time. It would be a radically weird place.
> Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer
It was a response to your original statement:
> This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer.
I am aware of HGT within bacteria and viral domains. Science has done more to study those domains in part because the genomes are much smaller and are more plentiful. Additionally, for species within Kingdom Animalia, biologists have turned toward DNA Barcoding as an identifier rather than whole genome sequencing, which functionally limits the data available for investigation of such anomalies. Hence we really don't have good data on HGT between animal species.
Is it really that rare to have transgenic organisms escape? I would imagine this will increase as the use/creation of transgenic organisms increase.
Two that came to mind right away are modified grasses for golf courses and africanized bees.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.393
But this bent grass was what I was talking about for the other part.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/82/i39/GENE-FLOW-TRANSGENIC-GRA...
I'm sure this is only a harbinger of things to come. As genetic engineering becomes cheaper and more accessible, genetically modified animals will become the norm, to the dismay of people obsessed with genetic purity everywhere.
Not at all, it’s being concerned about the effects of releasing genetically engineered species into the wild, both purposely or accidentally. It’s not questioning “is it right/wrong because they are different genetically” but “is it ethical to potentially change the environments of other species without understanding the ramifications”.
Also, can we please oh please not project this liberal meme of the "free market" on to Nature. Nature doesn't have "better" or "worse" ideas and it certainly doesn't have markets - at least till we came around.
That makes you wonder what other stuff engineered in labs could establish itself in our environments.
Factcheckers and experts say lab origin is a myth.
This isn’t something a fact-checker in the US can confirm from behind a desk.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/33efdea2-5b7b-4...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_in_fish#Ultraviolet
OTOH, if they taste good, I wonder if they'll become food for humans. A sushi that glows could be fun!
There's a lot of extra potential! Ever since the glowing mice videos (cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXM_WmwT2v4) I've wondered when glowing animals would get sold as pets.
Personally, I'd prefer a glowing cat (seriously! I love cats!)
I'd just want to make sure it doesn't impact the animal health or cause them any suffering. While I really want a cat that glows in the dark, I wouldn't want one that would suffer for my amusement.