Related papers: Horizontal gene transfer drives extreme physiologi…
How does the interplay between selection, mutation and horizontal gene transfer modify the phenotypic distribution of a bacterial or cell population? While horizontal gene transfer, which corresponds to the exchange of genetic material…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important factor in bacterial evolution that can act across species boundaries. Yet, we know little about rate and genomic targets of cross-lineage gene transfer, and about its effects on the recipient…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
The interpretation of recent environmental genomics data exposes the far-reaching influence of horizontal gene transfer, and is changing our basic concepts of organism, species and evolution itself.
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
The genome of bacterial species is much more flexible than that of eukaryotes. Moreover, the distributed genome hypothesis for bacteria states that the total number of genes present in a bacterial population is greater than the genome of…
The current picture of bacterial evolution is based largely on studies of 16S rRNA. However, this is just one gene. It is known that horizontal gene transfer can occur between bacterial species, although the frequency and implications of…
Although the role of lateral gene transfer is well recognized in the evolution of bacteria, it is generally assumed that it has had less influence among eukaryotes. To explore this hypothesis we compare the dynamics of genome evolution in…
Horizontal gene Transfer (HT) denotes the transmission of genetic material between two living organisms, while the vertical transmission refers to a DNA transfer from parents to their offspring. Consistent experimental evidence report that…
Related groups of microbes are widely distributed across Earth's habitats, implying numerous dispersal and adaptation events over evolutionary time. However, to date, relatively little is known about the characteristics and mechanisms of…
Many bacteria use rotating helical flagellar filaments to swim. The filaments undergo polymorphic transformations in which the helical pitch and radius change abruptly. These transformations arise in response to mechanical loading, changes…
Martincorena et al. estimated synonymous diversity ({\theta}s = 2N{\mu}) across 2,930 orthologous gene alignments from 34 Escherichia coli genomes, and found substantial variation among genes in the density of synonymous polymorphisms. They…
Aquifex aeolicus is a deep-branching hyperthermophilic chemoautotrophic bacterium restricted to hydrothermal vents and hot springs. These characteristics make it an excellent model system for studying the early evolution of metabolism. Here…
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important process in bacterial evolution. Current phylogeny-based approaches to capture it cannot however appropriately account for the fact that HGT can occur between bacteria living in different…
Many bacterial species are helical in form, including the widespread pathogen H. pylori. Motivated by recent experiments on H. pylori showing that cell wall synthesis is not uniform, we investigate the possible formation of helical cell…
The characteristics of cation radical (hole) migration in heterogeneous DNA were investigated on the basis of Kubo formula, in which correlation functions were obtained from solutions of systems of Bogoliubov hierarchy. The cutting of…
Adaptation of bacteria occurs predominantly via horizontal gene transfer (HGT). While it is widely recognized that horizontal acquisitions frequently encompass multiple genes, it is unclear what the size distribution of successfully…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
In a short article submitted to ArXiv [1], Maddamsetti et al. argue that the variation in the neutral mutation rate among genes in Escherichia coli that we recently reported [2] might be explained by horizontal gene transfer (HGT). To…