Genome-wide experimental determination of barriers to horizontal gene transfer

Item Type:	Article
Title:	Genome-wide experimental determination of barriers to horizontal gene transfer
Creators Name:	Sorek, R. and Zhu, Y. and Creevey, C.J. and Francino, M.P. and Bork, P. and Rubin, E.M.
Abstract:	Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferred from the genome of one organism to that of 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. Although 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.
Keywords:	Archaea, Archaeal Genes, Archaeal Genome, Bacteria, Bacterial Genes, Bacterial Genome, Computational Biology, Escherichia Coli, Gene Dosage, Genetic Speciation, Horizontal Gene Transfer, Molecular Cloning, Phylogeny
Source:	Science
ISSN:	0036-8075
Publisher:	American Association for the Advancement of Science
Volume:	318
Number:	5855
Page Range:	1449-1452
Date:	30 November 2007
Official Publication:	https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1147112
PubMed:	View item in PubMed

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