Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer
Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferred from the genome of one organism to another, has been investigated in microbial species mainly through computational sequence analyses. To address the lack of experimental data, we studied the attempted movement of 246,045 genes from 79 prokaryotic genomes into Escherichia coli and identified genes that consistently fail to transfer. We studied the mechanisms underlying transfer inhibition by placing coding regions from different species under the control of inducible promoters. Our data suggest that toxicity to the host inhibited transfer regardless of the species of origin and that increased gene dosage and associated increased expression may be a predominant cause for transfer failure. While these experimental studies examined transfer solely into E. coli, a computational analysis of gene transfer rates across available bacterial and archaeal genomes supports that the barriers observed in our study are general across the tree of life.
Genome-Wide Experimental Determination of Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer
Science 2007 Oct 18
What does this mean?
Bacteria are promiscuous, swapping genetic material like teenagers at an unsupervised party. So why, over millions of years of evolution, haven’t the millions of different kinds of bacteria all merged to become one identical organism? The reason is that there are barriers to horizontal gene transfer. This study suggest that the major one is toxicity – genes which produce functional products in one species produce toxins in a different host. And that’s why there are lots of different kinds of bacteria.
Tags: Bacteria, Biology, Genetics, Microbiology, Science
Splendid article! Humor about a ‘possible viagra party’ among bacteria was very apt.
‘Bacteria are promiscuous, swapping genetic material like teenagers at an unsupervised party.’
I enjoyed this interesting article. It is a subject I am interested in.