Electric eel’s zap can transfer genes to nearby animals

Yes! Electroporation is literally just subjecting the cells to a strong electrical potential. A lightning can definitely do the trick in some conditions. Many cells will die, but it is a sacrifice natural selection is willing to make.

Although, this doesn't mean you zapping someone with enough lightning and they can become the flash. The electroporation process is one way of damaging the cell just enough to make them take in foreign DNA. Think of it like poking holes in the cell and DNA got in. Whether that DNA get recombined or not depends on other processes, which might also get activated as a stress response to the damage. But it is entirely random. So the DNA coding that specific function/protein must be available in the environment first, and the cell must survive the process of getting struck by Zeus and be lucky enough to do the recombination just right to retain that piece of DNA to produce a proper mutant.

Lots of entropy here, like someone said elsewhere. But that is life. Do it enough time and maybe something fun come out of it.

As another pointed out, isn't this early experiment highly relevant to the discussion?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

Up until recently this was state of the art (or, spraying DNA really hard onto cells, or putting cells in a DNA-laced salty spike trap). All pretty barbaric methods really, and still widely used.

The fewer cells comprising the organism/thing the more likely it is to have any likelihood of a meaningful result. Which is not much at best because like the most fundamental capability of a living cell/organism is keeping out foreign DNA and not integrating and reproducing it if some does get in. So the approach is to do it on a massive scale and design in some easy way of recognizing/selecting for the successful ones i.e. if it happens in nature it's vanishingly unlikely that the zapped genotype lasts for more then a generation, just like with any other random mutation.

The likelihood of a zapped-in chunk being a major evolutionary advantage could be higher than that caused by an environmental factor, just because it can transfer big chunks of something that was once useful to someone else, versus the more point ish mutations caused by radiation etc.

In relation to the eels/lightning, the mechanism is totally plausible but the question should be more how meaningful is it in comparison to all the other ways DNA is transferred like viruses/bacteria/fungus, radiation, bad luck, etc. Generally other unicellular critters are somewhat better at sneaking in weird DNA than environmental factors because it's their trained profession or something

You can use chemicals too.

Is there some state of the art Handbook (Springer Taylor&Francis type) that you could recommend on physical methods of Transfection that goes into the physics of it?

Transfection by heat shock is also a possibility. Anything that creates transient pores on the cell membrane should work, at least in theory.

Perhaps the most brutal way of introducing nucleic acids into cells is microinjection: you make a really, really fine needle, jab it into a cell's nucleus, and inject a DNA solution. It is incredibly painstaking work, does kill a lot of the cells, and making the needles is a black art, but it works for all sorts of cells, even those resistant to chemical methods, so it is sometimes still useful.

While mostly used for plants, there's another method that's essentially shooting cells with bullets coated in genes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun

Viral infection is an example of another example of horizontal gene transfer. Some bacteria have developed other ways to take advantage of this process easily. Darwin might be surprised by this, but the experiments that first showed evidence for this are nearly a century old now so its nothing new for the field today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

Some bacteria are capable of naturally taking up genetics of nearby bacteria. There are other methods for horizontal gene transference. It happens more in simple organisms, but even humans are thought to have DNA in a genome transferred by ancient viruses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

"I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs." (Chapter 5)

Turns out it's you!

Its a byproduct of the electricity. No use case. Authors were turned on to try it because this is already a lab technique in a much more controlled manner to get some nucleic acids into some cell. They wanted to see if there is an example of this in nature and the electric eel seemed like a good potential source of the electricity.

"Lightning-triggered electroporation and electrofusion as possible contributors to natural horizontal gene transfer"

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S15710645130005...

To answer that there are two main factors: 1) For this kind of single instance gene transfer to have an evolutionary effect, it will need to happens to germ-line cell (so an egg or sperm cell in a multi-cellular organism, or in a single-celled organism). Otherwise the mutation won't be inheritable and it won't be evolution, just mutation.

2) The organism(s) affected by this gene transfer would need to be under some evolutionary pressure that would benefit from extra genetic variance. Genetic variance in itself is not a driver of evolution, evolutionary pressure is, which does need the variance to actually do anything. Pressure is the sculptor and variance is the clay, without one of those there won't be a statue.

Also, normally most random mutations are either negative or neutral (there's a lot more ways an organism can be dead than alive), so I would suspect this might also be true of gene transfers. Though gene transfers from environmental DNA isn't as random as direct genetic mutation, so perhaps there's something interesting happening there. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the risk of cancer or viral infections would be higher.