Year: 2022

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

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

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

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

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

LEAKY CONSERVED GENES. “Ironically, the barrier for highly conserved ribosomal RNA genes should be among the leakiest, whereas genes with rapidly changing sequences (such as those under diversifying selection) should observe tighter limits.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

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COGNATE MUTANTS. “Recombinational barriers imposed by the mismatch repair system are abrogated in cognate mutants. There is an appealing theory that such mutants play a key role in adaptation via recombination, and the mismatch repair genes themselves show a complex history of recombination attributed to loss and recovery (through horizontal transfer).” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

TWO PROKARYOTIC PROCESSES. “Evolution in these contexts illustrates how both mutational and recombinatorial processes can play important roles in adaptive evolution. Homologous recombination of large fragments of DNA may also be impeded by barriers imposed by restriction endonucleases.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

RAPID CHANGE. “Yet these barriers, which change at a very rapid pace, are not correlated with the degree of overall sequence divergence; and they do not preclude DNA transfer but only limit the size of transferred fragments.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn