A type of genetic material called “Borgs,” named after the sci-fi aliens from Star Trek, is a mystery to scientists. ScienceMagArchives
, the Borg are cybernetic aliens that assimilate humans and other creatures as a means of achieving perfection. So when Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, sifted through DNA in the mud of her backyard and discovered a strange linear chromosome that included genes from a variety of microbes, her Trekkie son proposed naming it after the sci-fi aliens. The new type of genetic material was a mystery. Maybe it was part of a viral genome.
"We started off with a piece of mud and 10 trillion pieces of DNA," Banfield says. One sample, taken from the mud on her property, contained a gene-filled stretch of DNA almost 1 million bases long—and more than half the genes were novel.
In every place, copies of the Borg co-occurred with DNA linked to a methane-oxidizing archaeon called. That suggests the Borgs may exist inside the microbe, the researchers say. But becausecan't be grown in a lab, the team hasn't been able to confirm this suspicion. Meanwhile, team members have ruled out the possibility that the Borg came from another microbe, as they lack many necessary genes for life, or a virus, which typically have shorter chromosomes.
Each Borg—which are now named after colors such as"olive" and"lilac"—includes not just novel genes, but recognizable ones whose functions scientists already know. For example, a few contain genes important for processing methane; such genes seem to have been acquired from specific microbes, such as.
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