horizontal gene transfer

This year’s stories highlight the expanding versatility of genetic techniques and the increasing utility of such research in all life science fields.

Researchers find so-called integrons, previously known only in bacteria, in their distantly related microbial relatives. 

Sequences for the model organism and two of its kin reveal how these plants got their oversized genomes.

Genetic studies have made it clear that eukaryotic horizontal gene transfer can and does happen. Exactly how, though, remains speculative.

Horizontally transferred genes play significant roles in eukaryotic genomes

DNA passed to and from all kinds of organisms, even across kingdoms, has helped shape the tree of life, to a large and undisputed degree in microbes and also unexpectedly in multicellular fungi, plants, and animals.

Jumping genes in bdelloid rotifers are tamped down by DNA methylation performed by an enzyme pilfered from bacteria roughly 60 million years ago, a study finds.

Studies The Scientist covered this year illustrate the expanding importance of genetic and genomic research in all aspects of life science, from ecology to medicine.

A newly identified gene family named “parasitoid killing factor” is found in both insect-infecting viruses and their hosts, although researchers can’t yet tell where they originated.

A study of human populations around the world detects differing rates of horizontal gene transfer in the microbiome depending on what kind of society those people live in.

Whiteflies overcome a toxin in plants they eat through the use of the plant’s own genetic protection, likely ferried from plant to insect millions of years ago by a virus.

Entire organelles bearing DNA move between strains of tobacco that were grafted to one another.

Their relocation explains horizontal genome transfer first described more than a decade ago.

Rather than introducing small chunks of DNA as other viruses do, some giant viruses can contribute more than 1 million base pairs to a host’s genome, broadening the ways in which viruses may shape eukaryote evolution.

Plants, fungi, and bacteria likely contributed to insect diversity.

An analysis suggests that DNA cribbed from soil microbes enabled plants’ ancestors to colonize a terrestrial environment.

A re-analysis of sequencing data from a 2016 study of these tiny metazoans reveals possible contamination, rather than an exchange of DNA among species.

Rather than getting a gene for its original function, a horizontal gene transfer provides the raw material for evolutionary innovation.