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SHARED CONSERVED GENES. “Some genes (and some parts of all genes) are more conserved in sequence than others and could potentially be exchanged among broader groups of organisms.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

CONSEQUENCES. “Nature is a highly interconnected and complex network of energy conduits. If you mess with one part of Nature, most likely you will affect something else.” https://lnkd.in/ga-TtUt View in LinkedIn

MICROBIAL RECOMBINATION. “This constraint might be taken as a barrier to interspecific exchange and could be used as an upper limit in the delineation of a microbial species. Yet the mismatch correction system (the principal obstacle to heterologous exchange) provides at best a leaky and imprecise barrier.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

RECOMBINATION CONSTRAINTS. “Homologous recombination is, to be sure, strongly constrained by degree of sequence difference and the nature of the machinery involved. Many careful studies show, not unexpectedly, that the ease with which genes recombine declines dramatically as their sequences diverge.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

SELFISH GENETIC ELEMENTS. “Furthermore, many of the agents of exchange (bacteriophages, transmissible and conjugative plasmids) are themselves best viewed as selfish elements. For them, interspecific transfer is selectively advantageous and might even be required for long-term persistence.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

RARE AND SMALL. “In contrast, even the most promiscuous prokaryotes experience recombination much less frequently than they reproduce, and the exchange involves only a tiny fraction of their genomes in any one event. There seems very little selective advantage in preventing such rare interspecific exchange.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

RECOMBINING SPECIES BARRIERS. “For animals that must recombine to reproduce, selection disfavors interspecific matings which, almost by definition, produce unfit or no progeny.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

PROKARYOTE SPECIES BARRIERS. “Indeed it is not clear that any evolved barriers to intergroup exchange (other than those effective against lethal viruses and parasitic genetic elements, such as restriction-modification systems should exist in prokaryotes.” Radical viewpoint. Prokaryotes have been generally lumped together with recombining species in the past. https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

“MOLECULAR PHYLOGENIES for different genes in different species should be congruent if interspecies recombination is infrequent. However, recombination across species boundaries—howsoever defined—does occur much more frequently than envisioned by Dykhuizen and Green, producing incongruent phylogenies between species as well as within them.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this series of quotes from a brilliant essay on nature’s connectedness. Dylan Thomas would have appreciated it: " "“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" "Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees" "Is my destroyer." "And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose" "My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.” https://lnkd.in/eU9uxsa View in LinkedIn