Year: 2022

SELECTIVE ADVANTAGES. “Of course natural selection will act as the arbiter of success for all recombinant cells. That is, the evolutionary importance of recombinatorial events will depend on the probability that the products of gene exchange offer selective advantages.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

COUNTERSELECTION. “If recombination has introduced maladaptive changes, eliminated niche-specific information, or disrupted coadapted alleles, then recombinant progeny will be counterselected. Therefore, ecological differentiation may impose a selective constraint on facile genetic exchange even in the absence of any mechanistic barriers imposed by the mismatch correction system.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

PROMISCUOUS AND RULE-BREAKING. “Horizontal, or lateral, gene transfer (HGT) is different, both in mechanism and in impact. Barriers to homologous (legitimate) recombination do not preclude its occurrence—even between very distantly related organisms—because numerous illegitimate means are available for integrating foreign DNA into the genome.” This is the real magic of horizontal gene transfer. https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

“HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER can occur between even very distantly related organisms, e.g., between bacteria and plants or fungi.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

PARTIALLY CONGRUENT. “The impact of such horizontal transfer is that molecular phylogenies calculated for different molecules from the same set of species, while often agreeing in broad outline, are only rarely completely congruent.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

EARLY DEARTH. “A decade ago, evolutionary biologists were hesitant to invoke horizontal gene transfer as an explanation for these discrepancies. Then a few cases in which a simple bifurcating tree was clearly an insufficient evolutionary metaphor were recognized.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

CURRENT ABUNDANCE. “Now, complete genome sequences offer an abundance of evidence for horizontal gene transfer and highlight its confounding effects in reconstructing the history of organismal evolution.” The difference a decade makes. https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

LINEAGE QUESTIONS. “Horizontal gene transfer leads to genomes whose constituent genes have different evolutionary histories. Can one retain the concept of a single organismal lineage in the face of apparently frequent horizontal gene transfer, or is this concept fatally flawed?” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

RADICAL NEW THINKING. “Gene-content phylogenies might be more properly viewed as taxonomies or phenetic classifications, while the equation of organismal phylogeny with the genealogy of only a small fraction of any organism's genes is, at least, a radical departure from traditional practice.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

CONSERVATIVE VIEW: “most transfers take place between closely related organisms, and the transfer rate between divergent organisms is low. In this case, most molecular phylogenies will agree in their overall topology. Lineages might be “fuzzy lines”, but the larger evolutionary pattern would be reflected in the majority consensus.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn