The horizontal gene transfer facilitated by mobile genetic elements impacts almost all areas of bacterial evolution, including the accretion and dissemination of antimicrobial-resistance genes in the human and animal pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. Genome surveys of staphylococcal plasmids have revealed an unexpected paucity of conjugation and mobilization loci, perhaps suggesting that conjugat...

The smaller tea tortrix, Adoxophyes honmai (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), is an economically important pest of tea in Japan. Previous work showed that a fast-killing nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) isolated from A. orana (AdorNPV) and a slow-killing NPV isolated from A. honmai (AdhoNPV) are both infectious to A. honmai larvae. Field application of these different NPVs was conducted against an A. honmai...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) serves as an important source of innovation for bacterial species. We used a pangenome-based approach to identify genes that were horizontally acquired by four closely related bacterial species, belonging to the Enterobacteriaceae family. This enabled us to examine the extent to which such closely related species tend to share horizontally acquired genes. We find ...

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 237 TRANSFERS INVOLVING EUKARYOTES 239 Phylogenetic Congruency Test 239 Pitfalls Involving Paralogies 241 Pitfalls Involving Unequal Razes 242 Convergent Replacements 243 Tests of Significance 244 MOBILE GENETIC ELEMENTS 244 CHROMOSOMAL GENES IN BACTERIA 245 Mosaic Nature of the E. coli chromosome 245 Salmonella and the Criteria of GC Content 247 Codon Bias 249 Other Bacte...

A number of pathogens may be transmitted from parent to child at or before birth (vertically) or from one individual to another by contact (horizontally). A natural deterministic and non-spatial model, introduced by Lipsitch et al. [Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. B 260 (1995) 321] shows that an epidemic is possible if the vertical transmission or the horizontal transmission is high enough. In cont...

The promiscuous spread of Tc1/mariner transposons across species implies that host factors are relatively unimportant for their transposition. Heterologous elements can integrate on expression of the corresponding transposases, an approach that should greatly facilitate genetic analysis in the zebrafish.

The main purpose of this paper is to determine the applicability of the constitutional social rights in the so-called horizontal relations, i.e. the relations between private entities. Nowadays the constitutional rights are more and more often violated by private entities and not only by the state. The private entities interfere with the privacy of individuals, limit their freedom of expression...

Studies of noncoding and pseudogene sequence diversity, particularly in Rickettsia, have begun to reveal the basic principles of genome degradation in microorganisms. Increasingly, studies of genes and genomes suggest that there has been an extensive amount of horizontal gene transfer among microorganisms. As this inflow of genetic material does not seem generally to have resulted in genome siz...

Horizontal gene transfer often leads to phenotypic changes within recipient organisms independent of any immediate evolutionary benefits. While secondary phenotypic effects of horizontal transfer (i.e., changes in growth rates) have been demonstrated and studied across a variety of systems using relatively small plasmids and phage, little is known about the magnitude or number of such costs aft...

It has been hypothesized that in the era just before the last universal common ancestor emerged, life on earth was fundamentally collective. Ancient life forms shared their genetic material freely through massive horizontal gene transfer (HGT). At a certain point, however, life made a transition to the modern era of individuality and vertical descent. Here we present a minimal model for stochas...