How a Parasitic Worm Forces Praying Mantises to Drown On their own

By Darren Incorvaia

For a praying mantis, feeding on the erroneous insect can be a one particular-way ticket to a watery grave. Some of its standard bug prey contain horsehair worms, Chordodes fukuii, which improve in a mantid’s gut—and by some means manipulate the mantid into diving into the closest body of drinking water. The spaghettilike worms then wriggle free of their drowned host and reproduce. Aquatic bugs try to eat the worms’ offspring and are then consumed by other mantids, and the cycle repeats.

Now scientists may well have discovered how the parasite pulls off its lethal trick: it appears to have advanced to use genes that its species at the time “stole” from the mantids on their own, enabling the worm to make proteins that impact the mantids’ nervous system. If confirmed, these conclusions, posted just lately in Recent Biology, would be the most intensive documented situation of gene transfer concerning animal species.

Mantids contaminated with C. fukuii develop into captivated to light, like the shiny floor of water. This actions is believed to crop up from protein-stage changes in each the parasite and the host’s brain, says senior author Takuya Sato, a biologist at Japan’s Kobe University. Since genes encode the instructions to construct these proteins, Sato and his colleagues set out to examine how equally species’ gene exercise transformed throughout the study course of a horsehair worm infection.

The team uncovered that a whopping 1,420 of the parasite’s genes resembled people of their hosts and that these genes have been most energetic when the parasite was pulling the host’s strings.

Genes can transfer from 1 dwelling organism to a different in a process called horizontal gene transfer, which is popular in microbes but unusual between animals. “That would be quite amazing—to have countless numbers of genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer from the host to parasites,” suggests Etienne Danchin, a biologist at France’s Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, who was not concerned with the research. “But I consider they want to verify this declare,” he says, because the scientists have not but situated these potentially stolen genes in the worm’s genome. The new analyze verified only that they had been present in the parasite’s tissue samples, and it is nonetheless achievable that some of these genes ended up just contamination from the mantid, Danchin claims.

“We really should reserve judgment on the role and extent of horizontal gene transfer until a whole genome sequence is accessible that confirms that the transcripts are properly attributed to the mantid and the worm,” says Julie Dunning Hotopp, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore, who was not concerned with the analyze.

Sato plans to examine the parasites’ genome subsequent. “The system of horizontal gene transfer in C. fukuii is even now a substantial secret,” he states. “By investigating genomes of C. fukuii and its mantid host,” he hopes to get nearer to unraveling it.