ABOVE: Spirogloea muscicola algae
BARBARA AND MICHAEL MELKONIAN
The evolution of life on land is commonly depicted as a fish that grows rudimentary limbs and crawls onto a beach. But the true terrestrial pioneers were bacteria and fungi—and some of these microbes lent a helping hand to an ancestor of plants and some algae, researchers reported yesterday (November 14) in Cell. The finding provides support for the controversial idea that bacteria can transfer genes not just amongst themselves, but also to more complex species.
“That horizontal gene transfer may have contributed to the colonization of land is pretty exciting,” Pamela Soltis, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved in the work, tells Science.
In the study, researchers led by Michael Melkonian of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and Gane Ka-Shu Wong of the University of Alberta in Canada sequenced the genomes of ...
