There are 10× more bacterial cells in our bodies from the microbiome than human cells. Viral DNA is known to integrate in the human genome, but the integration of bacterial DNA has not been described. Using publicly available sequence data from the human genome project, the 1000 Genomes Project, and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the study group examined bacterial DNA integration into the human somatic genome. Here they present evidence that bacterial DNA integrates into the human somatic genome through an RNA intermediate, and that such integrations are detected more frequently in (a) tumors than normal samples, (b) RNA than DNA samples, and (c) the mitochondrial genome than the nuclear genome. Hundreds of thousands of paired reads support random integration of
Acinetobacter-like DNA in the human mitochondrial genome in acute myeloid leukemia samples.
Read more:
Bacteria-Human Somatic Cell Lateral Gene Transfer Is Enriched in Cancer Samples
Source: Plos
Image credits: Institute Pasteur Paris, P. Gounon & A. Sekowska
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