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 ...

Scientists have known for decades that genes can be transferred from one species to another, both in animals and plants. However, the mechanism of how such an unlikely event occurs remained unknown.

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 ...

Fungi’s evolutionary roots stretch far deeper than once believed — up to 1.4 billion years ago, long before plants or animals ...

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 ...

For this analysis, investigators used metagenomic sequencing files from the Gut Bugs trial, a placebo-controlled multidonor fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) trial conducted among adolescents ...

There are probably around 20,000 genes in the human genome that code for protein, and cells have to transcribe DNA sequences into RNA, which is then processed before it is translated into proteins by ...

Professor Indraneel Mittra and his team show that DNA fragments from dying cells function as agents of horizontal gene transfer in mammalian cells.

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 ...