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RADICAL ORGANISMS IN UNREACHABLE NICHES. “Examples of such lineages include the green plants (acquiring chloroplast by endosymbiosis, methanotrophs (gaining the ability to synthesize critical cofactors by acquiring genes from methanogenic archaea, cyanobacteria (gaining a second photosystem allowing oxygenic photosynthesis, and bacteria exploiting halorhodopsin homologues as light-driven proton pumps.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

THE PEPPERED MOTH. “Yet the idea humans may be influencing evolution is not new. One well-known example involves moths that evolved a darker coloration as camouflage in the soot-covered backdrop of the industrial revolution.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

NICHE SALTATIONS. “Rarely, a gene transfer event may allow for the formation of radically different organisms that inhabit niches completely unreachable by organisms relying on mutational processes alone to explore environments.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BETTER GATHERERS. “The researchers also tagged the birds to count the amount of times they visited the feeders, finding longer-beaked ones showed up at the feeders more often than their more stubby-beaked cousins.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

BROAD VARIABILITY. “The niches created by gene transfer events vary widely in their stability or novelty. Some events, like the acquisition of an antibiotic resistance gene, allow for transient exploration of a new environment, but this lineage may not persist over evolutionary time (that is, this event will likely not found a clade of antibiotic-resistant bacteria distinguished by their shared ability to be resistant to a particular antibiotic).” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BROOD SURVIVAL ADVANTAGE. “In the U.K. the great tits with the genes for shorter beaks had fewer surviving chicks per year than those with longer ones...although the difference is small this probably means the latter were better able to bring seeds back to their young.” Millimeters count. https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

RAPID AND DYNAMIC. “Because the dynamic microbial niche is redefined after every horizontal gene transfer, lineage separation would occur if the populations exploring two newly derived niches were both successful. Surveys among closely related bacterial species support the hypothesis that the differences between them arose primarily by gene loss and gene acquisition, not by mutational processes.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

BRITISH ECCENTRICS. “Around half of U.K. homes feed birds in their gardens. And the U.K. spends twice as much on birdseed than the whole of continental Europe.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

REDEFINING EVENT. “The microbial niche can be considered a dynamic domain, which is redefined after each gene transfer event. This alternation of niche boundaries then imposes a different filter on the influx of foreign DNA, imparting different selective values on incoming genes.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn

DYNAMIC NICHES. “Because gene acquisitions can increase the metabolic repertoire of the cell, we need not view the microbial niche as a static domain, within which fitter variants constantly arise and sweep through the population. Although an organism may evolve to improve its fitness within its current niche, it is more likely that gene acquisition will allow exploitation of a related environment.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn