Water bears (tardigrades) may not be as alien as we thought…

; They like to live where it’s damp, in places like moss or soil, while other species are found in water. Lots of animals have a small amount of ‘foreign’ DNA from outside sources like plants or bacteria, such as primates which have around 0.5 per cent.

So it was pretty big news when scientists mapped water bears’ genomes and found they had a massive 17 per cent of their DNA from foreign sources. Unfortunately, it turns out that may not have been true. A new study from University of Edinburgh researchers has suggested the unusual results could have been due to contamination.

‘We independently sequenced the genome of H. dujardini [water bears to you and me] and detected a low level of horizontal gene transfer,’ they said.

The results were due to ‘a failure to eliminate contaminants from sequence data’, they claimed.
Overturning the original study, the new results have been hailed as showing the importance of open science and sharing data between rival teams to get accurate theories and new breakthroughs.

So water bears aren’t aliens after all?
We still love ya, tardigrades.

Source: View here