PZ Myers: Making popcorn for the coming tardigrade wars. [View all]

[longship]

Link: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/12/01/making-popcorn-for-the-coming-tardigrade-wars/

Some excerpts. Sorry, none of the many embedded links. One has to click through to get those. And my meager iPhone does not do such things very easily anyway.

This could get interesting. I’ve seen a lot of stories about this recent paper on the tardigrade genome.

(Snip long quote from paper.)

And here are a few of the follow-up stories in the popular press.

(Snip again, and here's where it becomes pure PZ, an actual scientist. He summarizes it)

The authors are saying that about 18% of the tardigrade genome is a product of horizontal gene transfer…that they’re full of genes gathered up from bacteria, and that this was adaptive, playing a role in their ability to survive desiccation.

I have to say…I had my doubts. That seemed really unlikely, not only that they’d have a history of that much HGT, but that it could be assigned to functional roles. But OK, they published it, let’s see how it shakes out.

Here’s where it gets interesting: another paper has just come online that says it’s all an artifact. Tardigrades are tiny, on the order of a thousand cells, so it’s difficult to sample them for sequencing without also picking up lots of bacterial contamination.

(Snip the abstract, then PZ's money shot)

This could get very interesting.

This is such a great exemplar of how science actually works. I thought it might interest DU science fans.

And here science fans, have a tardigrade: