Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a sensational topic largely because its exploitation to date has been primarily journalistic. Properly packaged it captures the attention of a sensitized lay public and peps up circulation. HGT provides technical challenges for academic scientists as well as market analysts. For fans of science fiction as well as for environmental pessimists, HGT is the stuff o...

One of the main concerns to design earth dam is the stability of the upstream slope of the earth dam in phase of rapid drawdown. Confined pore water pressure reduces the effective stress in this mode, so possibility of the instability and slippage will be increased. The main goal of this research is to investigate changes in the pore water pressure by using horizontal drains in upstream slope o...

The results of an ongoing FEM parametric study are presented regarding the dependence of the resulting piled raft behavior under lateral load and combination of loads on pile diameter, pile length, arrangement of piles and raft thickness. Taguchi method with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was employed to calculate the contribution ratio of these factors on the lateral displacement of piled raft. ...

Microbes have recently been recognized as dominant forces in nature, with studies benefiting from gene markers that can be quickly, informatively, and universally surveyed. Viruses, where explored, have proven to be powerful modulators of locally and globally important microbes through mortality, horizontal gene transfer, and metabolic reprogramming. However, community-wide virus studies have b...

An ancient endosymbiosis of an α-proteobacterium produced a diverse range of organelles including mitochondria. Reconstruction of the Pygsuia biforma proteome adds to the mosaic of functional systems present in mitochondrial-related organelles and demonstrates the role of horizontal gene transfer.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is considered as a major source of innovation in bacteria, and as such is expected to drive adaptation to new ecological niches. However, among the many genes acquired through HGT along the diversification history of genomes, only a fraction may have actively contributed to sustained ecological adaptation. We used a phylogenetic approach accounting for the transfe...

Methods designed for inferring phylogenetic trees have been widely applied to reconstruct biogeographic history. Because traditional phylogenetic methods used in biogeographic reconstruction are based on trees rather than networks, they follow the strict assumption in which dispersal among geographical units have occurred on the basis of single dispersal routes across regions and are, therefore...

Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to studies of cultural evolution. However, it has been claimed that the large amount of horizontal transmission that sometimes occurs between cultural groups invalidates the use of these methods. Here, we use a natural model of linguistic evolution to simulate borrowing between languages. The results show that tree topologies constructed with Baye...

This paper attempts to detect the existence of links in consumption preferences between generations. Preferences for consumption goods may be determined by the preferences of parents (vertical transmission) and/or by preferences arising from the environment (horizontal transmission). We propose an indirect methodology to overcome the lack of data on consumption choices of dynasties, i.e., paren...

The hypothesis that variability in natural habitats promotes modular organization is widely accepted for cellular networks. However, results of some data analyses and theoretical studies have begun to cast doubt on the impact of habitat variability on modularity in metabolic networks. Therefore, we re-evaluated this hypothesis using statistical data analysis and current metabolic information. W...