DNA in food finds its way into cells AND so why shiver ...HOW ?

"Every Day And In Every Way I Am Getting Better And Better"...
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THE adage that "You are what You eat" has taken on a whole new meaning. http://www.psrast.org/dnauptakechick.htm

Researchers in Germany claim that DNA fed to a mouse can survive digestion and invade cells throughout its body. Because food contains DNA, this may be a way for species to acquire genes, they argue. http://www.dnasporen.nl/docs/literatuur/Animal%20Trace%20Poster2003.pdf

The surprising results were announced by Walter Dörfler of the University of Cologne at the International Congress on Cell Biology in San Francisco last month. "We're taking in DNA in food every day," he says. "In my mind, the question became: why isn't DNA incorporated all the time in animals?"

Corresponding author. Mailing address: Institute for Virology, Erlangen University Medical School, Schlossgarten 4, D-91054 Erlangen, Germany. Phone: (49) 9131-852-6002. Fax: (49) 9131-852-2101. E-mail: Walter.Doerfler@viro.med.uni-erlangen.de

Textbooks say that DNA in food should be digested and destroyed. But Dörfler and his student Rainer Schubbert found that when they fed a bacterial virus called M13 to a mouse, sections of its genetic material about 700 DNA "letters" long—large enough to contain a gene—survived to emerge in faeces. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/3/961?ck=nck

The researchers wondered whether a few of these genetic snippets had managed to penetrate the mouse's cells. They took cells from the mice and probed them with a dye molecule that lights up when it binds to the M13 DNA. The probe lit up inside cells not only from the intestine, but the spleen, white blood cells and liver. "They weren't hard to find," says Dörfler. "In some cases as much as one cell in a thousand had viral DNA." http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=9023365

Usually the DNA does not stay long inside the cells. After 18 hours, most cells had somehow ejected the viral intruders. But Dörfler speculates that occasionally some foreign DNA may remain.

Other researchers are sceptical. "It's amazing that this DNA could get all the way into the blood," says Rudolf Jaenisch, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He warns that the German team's results are "very preliminary", and that they have not been able to determine how much DNA is absorbed by the cells. Jaenisch suspects that the amounts would be so small that any effect on a cell is minimal.
Jaenisch@wi.mit.edu

From issue 2063 of New Scientist magazine, page 14, 04 January 1997