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VIRAL PARENTS. "‘Virio-Darwinism’ might explain evolutionary changes and inventions, which would be hard to explain otherwise. Indeed, viruses seem to be involved in major evolutionary inventions such as the origin of mammals or eukaryotes." https://lnkd.in/ehNRjAC View in LinkedIn

HIGHER ANIMALS. "HGT is a general feature of chordate genomes." https://lnkd.in/e5G7Nk8 View in LinkedIn

VIRAL MOSAICS. "Around 8 to 10 per cent of your DNA comes from viral ancestors. These sequences are the remains of prehistoric viruses that inserted their DNA into the genes of our ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of them became permanent residents, and were passed down from parent to child. These endogenous retroviruses, or ERVs, are a legacy of epidemics past." https://lnkd.in/eVAWchP View in LinkedIn

INSERTS ARE STABLE. "Foreign genes undergo duplication and are distributed throughout the genome." https://lnkd.in/e5G7Nk8 View in LinkedIn

TOO COMPLEX FOR HIGH INNOVATION. "At some point...cells reached a certain threshold of complexity at which it became detrimental to embrace a bombardment of foreign genes." https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life View in LinkedIn

OLD AND NEW. "Horizontal gene transfer is both ancient and ongoing." https://lnkd.in/e5G7Nk8 View in LinkedIn

COMPLEX BEINGS RESIST INNOVATION. "A primordial cell harbouring a small group of genes can potentially gain a lot by adding new genes to its repertoire; but a more sophisticated cell with hundreds or thousands of genes risks imbalancing an intricate genome fine-tuned by a longer period of natural selection. So, complex eukaryotic cells evolved new ways to protect their DNA and expunge genetic invaders." https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life View in LinkedIn

NO TREE OF LIFE. "Rather than rising from a single trunk, they say, the tree of life stands on an interweaving root system. Rather than evolving from one ‘last universal ancestor’, all life arose from a communal pool of primitive cells with unbridled zeal for exchanging DNA. For relatively simple cells with only a handful of genes each, swapping DNA was an excellent strategy for acquiring and preserving the best adaptations around." https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life View in LinkedIn

DOWNSIDE OF INNOVATION. "Unfortunately, HGT has also allowed adaptation to the human host environment, both by spreading pathogenicity determinants and by allowing pathogenic bacteria to acquire resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics." https://lnkd.in/ej6mCcR View in LinkedIn

GENE IMPORTS EXPAND INNOVATION. "Our results extend recent findings that HGT is more prevalent in animals than previously suspected, and they suggest that organisms that survive extreme stresses might be predisposed to acquiring foreign genes." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/15976.abstract View in LinkedIn