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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

"FOREIGN GENES have supplemented, expanded, and even replaced some metazoan gene families within the tardigrade genome. Our results demonstrate that an unexpectedly large fraction of an animal genome can be derived from foreign sources." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/15976.abstract View in LinkedIn

EXTREMOPHILE HGT. "Approximately one-sixth of the genes in the tardigrade genome were found to have been acquired through horizontal transfer, a proportion nearly double the proportion of previous known cases of extreme horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in animals." https://lnkd.in/epvRixb View in LinkedIn

SINGLE STRAND DNA IMPORTS. "Generally, competent bacteria can translocate chromosomal DNA fragments, plasmids or phage DNA across their membrane(s). The actual translocation process varies among taxa, but usually involves the transfer of single DNA strands." https://lnkd.in/eXE-r93 View in LinkedIn

NO FAMILY UNTOUCHED. "The results of a network analysis of shared genes agree with the idea that horizontal gene transfer leaves no gene family untouched." https://lnkd.in/eVQ_4UY View in LinkedIn

PARTNER GOVERNED. "It has been shown that the integration of a single transferred gene into regulatory interaction networks is very slow. In the case of genes providing the receptor with new functions...it is dependent on the number of partners for the gene product in the regulatory network...products of these genes are integrated in the periphery of the corresponding regulatory network. On the other hand, transferred genes codifying for products with few partners are more easily deleted from genomes." https://lnkd.in/eVQ_4UY View in LinkedIn

SUPERGENOME. "Both the size and composition of the gene pool available to be incorporated into the genome of an organism by HGT, also known as its ‘supergenome’, are dependent on the environment it inhabits." https://lnkd.in/eXE-r93 View in LinkedIn

GENE SUPER-HIGHWAYS. "The preferential exchange of genetic material among species inhabiting the same environments may lead to the emergence of assemblages of species or communities which become bound together not only through adaptation to similar conditions but also through access and sharing of an almost common gene pool." https://lnkd.in/eXE-r93 View in LinkedIn