Year: 2022

DONATE GENES. "Notably, the GTAs confer on their carriers the ability to donate rather than acquire genetic material. Such a capacity could be adaptive in the context of utilization of “public goods” by microbial communities. The wide spread of GTAs appears to present strong evidence of evolvability of HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer; GTAs = gene transfer agents). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DOMESTICATED MOBILE ELEMENTS. "These examples highlight the apparent major route of evolution of HGT vehicles, through stepwise domestication and “enslavement” of selfish genetic elements, such as plasmids and viruses, whereby the hosts exploit the inherent ability of such elements to transfer genetic material." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

STEADY AS WELL AS BURSTS. "Several large-scale reconstructions of microbial genome evolution suggest that gene loss occurs in a roughly clock-like manner whereas gene gain tends to be episodic, occurring in bursts that involve acquisition of many genes over a short time." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE TRANSITIONS. "These observations prompted the hypothesis that emergence of new major groups of organisms often, perhaps typically, involves massive gene gain via HGT (in microbes) or extensive, in some cases, whole genome duplication (in eukaryotes) followed by gradual genome streamlining via gene loss in each of the lineages." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

ESTABLISHED FACT. "The importance of massive HGT in at least two major evolutionary transitions, namely the origin of eukaryotes and the origin of the eukaryotic supergroup Archaeplastida (algae and plants), is beyond doubt." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

GIANT GENE TRANSFERS. "In these special cases, the sources of the hundreds if not thousands of transferred genes were mitochondria and chloroplasts, respectively, i.e. bacterial endosymbionts on the path to becoming eukaryotic organelles." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

FITS AND STARTS. "Eukaryotes acquired the majority of bacterial genes in the two major bursts associated with the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts whereas subsequent, continuous acquisition of bacterial genes was limited in extent." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. "Acquisition of the mitochondria precipitated the series of dramatic changes in the organization of the chimeric cell which led to the curtailment of HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

LAST BURST. "Thus, the acquisition of numerous genes from the proto-mitochondrion comes across as the last major burst of HGT (other than the acquisition of chloroplast genes at the base of the Archaeplastida), although numerous lineage-specific acquisitions of relatively small but biologically consequential groups of bacterial genes as well as eukaryote-to-eukaryote transfers undoubtedly occurred at later stages." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT PROCESS. "There is no reasonable doubt anymore that HGT is a dominant process in microbial evolution that generally occurs at a high rate. Moreover, the relevance of ‘horizontal’ as applied to gene flow is validated by the strong evidence of the existence of a central vertical, tree-like trend in genome evolution." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn