The Horizontal Gene Pool — Bacterial Plasmids and Gene Spread

Horizontal Gene Transfer and The Evolution of Bacterial Cooperation

Bacteria frequently exhibit cooperative behaviors but cooperative strains are vulnerable to invasion by cheater strains that reap the benefits of cooperation but do not perform the cooperative behavior themselves. Bacterial genomes often contain mobile genetic elements such as plasmids. When a gene for cooperative behavior exists on a plasmid, cheaters can be forced to cooperate by infection wi...

Archaeal and bacterial hyperthermophiles: horizontal gene exchange or common ancestry?

Genomic islands: tools of bacterial horizontal gene transfer and evolution

Bacterial genomes evolve through mutations, rearrangements or horizontal gene transfer. Besides the core genes encoding essential metabolic functions, bacterial genomes also harbour a number of accessory genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer that might be beneficial under certain environmental conditions. The horizontal gene transfer contributes to the diversification and adaptation of mic...

The gene pool

Any good journalist knows that, if you can’t deliver the facts, at least you can offer up a bit of entertainment. Genome scientists have co-opted that strategy when it comes to the seemingly immortal question of how many human genes there are. Frankly, nobody seems to have a clue. So at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory genome meeting this May, they decided to collect a different form of data —...

Horizontal gene transfer of a bacterial insect toxin gene into the Epichloë fungal symbionts of grasses

Horizontal gene transfer is recognized as an important factor in genome evolution, particularly when the newly acquired gene confers a new capability to the recipient species. We identified a gene similar to the makes caterpillars floppy (mcf1 and mcf2) insect toxin genes in Photorhabdus, bacterial symbionts of nematodes, in the genomes of the Epichloë fungi, which are intercellular symbionts o...