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Update (October 26, 2022): The study referenced in this story has now been published in Nature.
Researchers have discovered what may be a novel form of giant, extrachromosomal DNA in mud-dwelling archaea, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv last week (July 12).
They’re “not like anything that’s been seen before,” University of Texas microbiologist Brett Baker, who was not involved in the study, tells Nature.
Extrachromosomal elements (ECE) include structures such as viruses, plasmids, and megaplasmids, and contribute to features such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria. But according to the paper, the newly discovered structures, which the researchers call Borgs, weigh in at between 600,000 and more than 1 million base pairs—far too big to fit into any of these known ECE categories. According to University of California, Berkeley, geomicrobiologist Jill Banfield, who led the study, that’s about one-third the size ...
