Gonorrhea Steals DNA From Humans
14th February 2011
It’d been previously known that genes could transfer between different bacteria, and even between bacteria and yeast cells, but biologists at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine discovered that Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacteria responsible for gonorrhea, had stolen a sequence of DNA bases (As, Ts, Cs and Gs) from an L1 DNA element found in humans.
Seifert also screened the bacteria that causes meningitis, Neisseria meningitidis, which is very similar to the gonorrhea bacteria at the genetic level. There was no sign of the human DNA signature, suggesting that the gene transfer occurred relatively recently.