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, ...

In a recent study published in Cell, researchers used a multi-omics approach to profile the gut microbiomes and metabolomes of mothers and infants to determine the vertical and horizontal transmission ...

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a microbial community phenomenon that essentially equates to teaching neighbors how to complete necessary tasks by ripping out and sharing ...

When the human genome was first published, the suggestion that it contained bacterial genes was controversial. Subsequent studies questioned the possibility of HGT, offering alternate explanations for ...

The problem of antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) pollution in the environment has become one of the most severe public health ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 116, No. 36 (September 3, 2019), pp. 17906-17915 (10 pages) Bacteria evolve by mutation accumulation in laboratory ...

It’s freecycling, but for DNA. Grasses routinely pass genes from one plant to another, even if they belong to distantly related species. “We’ve shown that lateral gene transfer is a widespread process ...

The movement of genetic material between organisms that aren't directly related is a significant driver of evolution, especially among single-celled organisms like bacteria and archaea. A team led by ...

A new study has shown that virus-like transposons, called Mavericks, are responsible for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in nematodes. Researchers led by Alejandro Burga at the Austrian Academy of ...

Little did biologist Gregor Mendel know that his experiments with sweet peas in a monastery garden in Brno, Czech Republic, would lay the foundations for our understanding of modern genetics and ...