Microbes evolve predominantly by acquiring genes from other microbes, new research suggests, challenging previous theories that gene duplication is the primary driver of protein evolution in prokaryotes.
The finding, linkurl:published today;http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1001284 (January 27) in PLoS Genetics, could change the way scientists study and model biological networks and protein evolution."Even at a meeting last summer, there were those that thought that bacteria genomes expanded mostly through duplications and others that argued that it was due to gene acquisition," wrote linkurl:Howard Ochman,;http://www.biochem.arizona.edu/ochman/index.htm an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research, in an Email to The Scientist. "Now we all have a paper to point to that does a very good job of answering this question," he said. "Their conclusions are really robust."Prokaryotes, including bacteria and archaea, thrive in diverse conditions thanks to their ability to rapidly modify their...
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linkurl:Janice Carr, Wikimedia;http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HelicobacterPylori2.jpg |
Treangen, T.J. et al., "Horizontal Transfer, Not Duplication, Drives the Expansion of Protein Families in Prokaryotes," PLoS Genetics, 7:e1101284, 2011.
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