Category: horizontal gene transfer
Researchers: Cross species transfer has been “an important driver of evolution”
| July 10, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Far from just being the product of our parents, University of Adelaide scientists have shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today’s mammals, and been an important driver of evolution. In the world’s largest study of so-called “jumping genes,” the researchers have traced two particular jumping […]
Researchers: Horizontal gene transfer drives global infectious disease
| April 20, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A new study by scientists at the University of Liverpool documents, for the first time, how the ability of bacteria to swap genetic material with each other can directly affect the emergence and spread of globally important infectious diseases. Known as ‘horizontal gene transfer’, this phenomenon is understood to have played a role […]
Sure we need to teach evolution: How about horizontal gene transfer in antibiotic resistance?
| March 5, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
Not how we are all apes but how bacteria can get the better of us? Jathink? From ScienceDaily: That may sound scarce; however, .” ..as only a small number of strains (<10%) were isolated from farm and urban environments, we were surprised to find one with mcr-1 on a transferable plasmid, which is a relatively […]
Giant virus shares genes (core histones) with complex life forms. But what exactly does that imply?
| February 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Tree of life |
From ScienceDaily: “It’s exciting and significant to find a living family of giant viruses with eukaryote-specific genes in a form that predates the latest common ancestor of all eukaryotes,” says Albert Erives, associate professor in the Department of Biology. “These viruses are like time machines that tell us more about how life on our planet […]
Researchers: Could an ancient virus account for human consciousness?
| February 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
From Rafi Letzter at LiveScience: According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information […]
(Real non-Darwinian) evolution in action: Bacteria murder rivals and steal their genes
| December 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria not only develop resistance to antibiotics, they also can pick it up from their rivals. In a recent publication in Cell Reports, Researchers from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have demonstrated that some bacteria inject a toxic cocktail into their competitors causing cell lysis and death. Then, by integrating the […]
Researchers ask: Do viruses share genes across the kingdoms of life?
| December 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer |
Horizontal gene transfer on skates. Wow, re evolution. From ScienceDaily: A new study finds that viruses share some genes exclusively with cells that are not their hosts. The study, reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, adds to the evidence that viruses swap genes with a variety of cellular organisms and are agents of diversity, […]
Earliest pre-life depended on horizontal gene transfer?
| September 11, 2017 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Nigel Goldenfeld applies the physics of condensed matter to understand why evolution was blazingly fast for the earliest life — and then slowed down. Cepelewicz So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution? Goldenfeld: When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population […]
Genomic analysis sheds more light on amazing, indestructible tardigrade (water bear)
| July 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genomics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
But leaves phylogeny unclear. From ScienceDaily: Tardigrades are microscopic animals, justly famous for their amazing ability to withstand complete dehydration, resurrecting years later when water is again available. Once desiccated, they have been frozen in ice, exposed to radiation, sent into space vacuum… and still they spring back to life. Tardigrades became more famous recently […]
Pushback against “deep evolution” (we are descended from complex ancestor) and HGT
| March 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Also, doubts about horizontal gene transfer persist. First, from Suzan Mazur earlier at Huffington Post on deep evolution: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor […]
Horizontal gene transfer in bacteria: Numbers surprise researchers
| March 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Gene transfers are particularly common in the antibiotic-resistance genes of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. When mammals breed, the genome of the offspring is a combination of the parents’ genomes. Bacteria, by contrast, reproduce through cell division. In theory, this means that the genomes of the offspring are copies of the parent genome. However, the […]
Origin of life: Horizontal gene transfer “negligible” and endosymbiosis “wrong” as factors in earliest known life?
| February 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Genetics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, continuing her interview at Huffington Post with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish regarding … their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and […]
Nature launches new journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution
| November 11, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Peer review, Science |
Here: Multicopy plasmids potentiate the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria As well as allowing horizontal gene transfer, the increased copy number of plasmids could accelerate evolution. Here, it is shown that… More. One can browse four articles for free, include the above. Perhaps they are hoping to accommodate non-Darwinian evolution more formally. Follow UD […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Virus carries DNA of black widow spider toxin
| October 31, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
Everyone goes a bit nuts at Hallowe’en and I (O’Leary for News) just couldn’t resist this one, before I go back to serious work. From ScienceDaily: Biologists sequencing the genome of the WO virus, which infects the bacterial parasite Wolbachia, have discovered that the phage carries DNA that produces black widow spider toxin: the first […]
Can parasitic plants use hosts’ genes against them?
| October 29, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Sneaky parasitic weeds may be able to steal genes from the plants they are attacking and then use those genes against the host plant, according to a team of scientists. In a study, researchers detected 52 incidents of the nonsexual transfer of DNA — known as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT — from […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Researchers believe any two major groups of organisms can share genetic codes
| October 26, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, News |
This is not the “evolution” your high school textbook set forth. That stuff was Darwinism, plain and simple. From Kelly Robinson and Julie Dunning Hotopp at The Scientist Scientists now recognize that microbes transfer DNA to the plants, fungi, and animals they infect or reside in, and conversely, human long interspersed elements (LINEs) have been […]
Darwinism is a metaphysic. What is it doing in schoolbook science?
| June 7, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, science education |
Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design […]
Denis Noble: Evolution needs replacement, not extension
| June 6, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer |
In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’s Denis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended: The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics […]
HGT: Gut microbes jump to insect hosts
| June 2, 2016 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Many plant-feeding insects need microbial enzymes, such as pectinases, that degrade plant cell walls; yet some insects have overcome this dependency in a surprising way. Now researchers found that stick insects make microbial enzymes themselves. From an ancestral gut microbe, the genes for the essential enzymes simply ‘jumped’ as they are to their […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Mapping antibiotic resistance
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding […]
