Month: September 2022

VERTICAL SIGNAL STRENGTH. It is thought that "HGT is frequent at all biologically relevant levels and time-scales. Given the number of individual organisms inhabiting our planet and the time elapsed since cellular life became established on Earth, a high frequency of HGT would certainly lead to erasing most, if not all, signs of vertical inheritance...But, by enlarge, HGT has not completely blurred the phylogenetic signal resulting from vertical transmission of genetic material." https://lnkd.in/eXE-r93 View in LinkedIn

BOLT-ON ELEMENTS. "Mobile DNA elements are mosaics of functional modules." https://lnkd.in/ej6mCcR View in LinkedIn

ENORMOUS DIVERSITY. "One significant barrier to incorporating information about the mechanism of HGT into genomic analyses is the sheer diversity of mobile elements that are known to exist." https://lnkd.in/ej6mCcR View in LinkedIn

ILLUSIVE AND SLIPPERY. "Mobile elements as varied as conjugative transposons, transposable prophages, integrative plasmids and mobile integrons appear on first inspection to be extremely difficult to detect and categorize systematically." https://lnkd.in/ej6mCcR View in LinkedIn

OLD DEBATE. "Horizontal gene transfer involves the exchange of genetic material between different organisms in a single generation. Evidently, once transferred, natural selection can determine which genes spread throughout populations. But the acquisition of novel genes in a single generation, in my point of view, is far from the gradualist or slow-change principle proposed by the neo-Darwinians, and it has a certain Lamarckian taste." https://lnkd.in/eVQ_4UY View in LinkedIn

NO SPECIES BARRIER. "Because of their prevalence, phages are likely to play an important role in gene transfer in the environment. Although it used to be thought that phages only rarely crossed species boundaries, broad-host-range (BHR) generalized transducing phages that can transfer genes between species and genera have recently been discovered at high frequency in different natural environments." https://lnkd.in/eXE-r93 View in LinkedIn

CELL FRAGMENT SURPRISE. "DNA fragmentation is a biochemical hallmark of apoptosis. It was shown that horizontal DNA transfer between mammalian cells can occur through the uptake of apoptotic bodies, where genes from the apoptotic cells were transferred to neighbouring cells phagocytosing the apoptotic bodies." https://lnkd.in/evv6az7 View in LinkedIn

JUMPING GENES. "Researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington have found the first solid evidence of horizontal DNA transfer, the movement of genetic material among non-mating species, between parasitic invertebrates and some of their vertebrate hosts." https://lnkd.in/eWWzdkB View in LinkedIn

WE ARE GENETIC MOSAICS. "Around half of the human genome is made up of bits of DNA that have copied themselves and jumped around, creating vast tracts of repetitive sequences. The same is true for the cow genome, where one particular piece of DNA, known as BovB, has run amok. It’s there in its thousands. Around a quarter of a cow’s DNA is made of BovB sequences or their descendants." This cow DNA came from snakes." https://lnkd.in/ekpvtvZ View in LinkedIn

BUSY GENE. "On its epic journey through the tree of life, BovB has jumped between species at least nine times, and seems to have moved from reptiles to mammals." https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life View in LinkedIn