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New Scientist
August 12, 2006SECTION: NEWS;
This Week; Pg. 13
LENGTH: 414 words
HEADLINE: The selfish gene that learned to
cooperate
BYLINE: Kurt Kleiner
BODY:GENES are famously
selfish, but they can also be sweetly cooperative. Now for the first time a gene
for altruism has been discovered that smooths the cooperation necessary for
cells to live together.
The gene, called
regA ,
helps a unicellular green alga survive a hostile environment and also helps
cells in a related, multicelled alga cooperate. The research provides insight
into how unicellular organisms might originally have developed into multicelled
organisms, and into the genetic basis of social behaviour.
Volvox carteri is a green alga made up of about 2000 small cells
arranged in a ball, and 16 much larger reproductive cells. The small cells
cannot divide, and instead devote their energy to propelling the organism
through the water with their flagella.
When
V.
carteri reproduces, the cells divide asymmetrically, so that the daughters
also end up with a few large cells that are capable of reproducing and thousands
of small cells that are not. It's a novel example of reproductive altruism, in
which an individual - in this case a cell - gives up the chance to reproduce in
order to increase the reproductive fitness of others that share some or all of
its genes. The
regA gene stops the small cells from reproducing by
suppressing formation of new chloroplasts and preventing the cells from growing
large enough to divide.
But how is the cooperative gene
linked to a selfish one? Aurora
Nedelcu of the University of New
Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, and Richard Michod of the University of
Arizona, Tucson, found a similar gene in
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii , a
green alga that lives as a single cell. In
C. reinhardtii , however,
regA is switched on only during harsh environmental conditions, such as a
lack of sunlight or nutrients. The gene apparently helps the alga conserve
energy and survive during lean times, giving it a better chance of living to
reproduce under better conditions (
Molecular Biology and Evolution , vol
23, p 1460).
At some point, a mutation seems to have
occurred which turned the selfish gene into a cooperative one, and made it
possible for
V. carteri to develop specialised cells.
Nedelcu says
analogous processes might have allowed other multicellular organisms to develop
from unicellular organisms.
"It's an important step
forward," says Gene Robinson, a biologist at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign. "The evolutionary roots of altruism have been functionally
traced from a solitary species to a more social species."
LOAD-DATE: August 12, 2006