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 ...

The movement or acquisition of genetic material between organisms that is not the result of vertical inheritance (reproduction) is called horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer. Horizontal gene ...

A newly revealed mechanism of horizontal gene transfer improves understanding of how antibiotic resistance is transferred between bacteria. The increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance (AR) is a ...

A team led by Tappei Mishina at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) has discovered that parasites manipulate their hosts using stolen genes that they likely acquired through a ...

With more than 50,000 described species, the leaf beetle family is distributed worldwide and represents about a quarter of the species diversity of all herbivores. Leaf beetles can be found to feed on ...

Scientists explored the evolutionary success of leaf beetles, the most diverse herbivores on Earth. They showed that symbioses with bacteria have evolved repeatedly and independently in different ...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the transfer of genetic material between distinct species, a process that plays a major role in the evolution of a genome. There is an increasing body of evidence for ...