Enigmatic DNA ‘Borgs’ that assimilate genes from host cells found lurking in wetland soil

PROF JILL BANFIELD

Geomicrobiologist

YOU’VE DISCOVERED SOMETHING YOU’VE CALLED ‘BORGS’. WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEY?

All organisms have a genome. In fact, things that we don’t necessarily think of as living organisms have genomes too. People will be familiar with viruses, for example, or maybe plasmids. These rely on other organisms to replicate, to make copies of themselves to survive and propagate.

The Borgs are a kind of DNA-based entity – we can’t call them an organism – that lives with and depends on a kind of organism called an ‘archaean’. To put that in context, all life on Earth classifies into one of three major groups: bacteria, like , for example; eukaryotes – you and plants and fungi are all eukaryotes; then the third group are archaea. They’re much less studied, but really interesting. They were originally thought to be extremophiles, meaning they live