The Scientist – 15/12/2014
Communicating Across Kingdoms?
Sandhya Sekar | December 15, 2014
Researchers pinpoint microRNAs that could play a role in how Wolbachia bacteria manipulate their arthropod hosts.
Wolbachia bacteria live inside the cells of other species and can strongly influence the lives of their hosts. These bacteria manipulate host reproductive biology to increase their own transmission. Wolbachia have been documented in more than 40 percent of terrestrial arthropods.
Exactly how Wolbachia manage to manipulate a wide variety of hosts has puzzled scientists for decades. In a paper published in PNAS today (December 15), Sassan Asgari from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues propose a microRNA-mediated mechanism by which Wolbachia could achieve such “cross-kingdom communication.”