The small molecules produced by environmental bacteria have been mainstays of both chemical and biological research for decades, and some have led to important therapeutic interventions. These small molecules have been shaped by natural selection as they evolved to fulfill changing functional roles in their native environments. This minireview describes some recent systematic studies providing ...

We investigate the standard chemostat model when lateral gene transfer is taken into account. We will show that when the different genotypes have growth rate functions that are sufficiently close to a common growth rate function, and when the yields of the genotypes are sufficiently close to a common value, then the population evolves to a globally stable steady state, at which all genotypes co...

Increasingly, studies of genes and genomes are indicating that considerable horizontal transfer has occurred between prokaryotes. Extensive horizontal transfer has occurred for operational genes (those involved in housekeeping), whereas informational genes (those involved in transcription, translation, and related processes) are seldomly horizontally transferred. Through phylogenetic analysis o...

We recently showed that the wheat pathogen Stagonospora nodorum produces proteinaceous host-selective toxins (HSTs). These toxins include SnTox1 as well as SnToxA, a HST first identified from Pyrenophora tritici-repentis that was implicated in a very recent horizontal gene transfer event from S. nodorum to P. tritici-repentis. Compelling evidence implicating SnToxA and SnTox1 in disease develop...

The contribution of horizontal gene transfer to evolution has been controversial since it was suggested to be a force driving evolution in the microbial world. In this paper, I review the current standpoint on horizontal gene transfer in evolutionary thinking and discuss how important horizontal gene transfer is in evolution in the broad sense, and particularly in prokaryotic evolution. I revie...

Integrative conjugative elements (ICEs) enable horizontal gene transfer among bacteria. In Pseudomonas, only a phenotypically distinct subpopulation of ICE-bearing cells can mobilize ICE DNA to new hosts. Transfer competence is a terminal state; division is limited, and many cells lyse.

A broad swath of eukaryotic microbial biodiversity cannot be cultivated in the lab and is therefore inaccessible to conventional genome-wide comparative methods. One promising approach to study these lineages is single cell genomics (SCG), whereby an individual cell is captured from nature and genome data are produced from the amplified total DNA. Here we tested the efficacy of SCG to generate ...

Conjugation and natural competence are two major mechanisms that explain the acquisition of foreign genes throughout bacterial evolution. In recent decades, several studies in model organisms have revealed in great detail the steps involved in such processes. The findings support the idea that the major basis of these mechanisms is essentially similar in all bacteria. However, recent work has p...

in this paper, it has been shown that there is a special relation between horizontal and vertical gradients of gravity data and the vertical and horizontal components of magnetic data for some of 2-d sources. it has been shown that the hilbert transform is useful in calculating the vertical gradient of gravity and magnetic anomalies from the horizontal gradient for transformation of gravity and...