UNLABELLED Unraveling the drivers controlling the response and adaptation of biological communities to environmental change, especially anthropogenic activities, is a central but poorly understood issue in ecology and evolution. Comparative genomics studies suggest that lateral gene transfer (LGT) is a major force driving microbial genome evolution, but its role in the evolution of microbial co...

Lateral gene transfers (LGT), species to species transmission of genes by means other than direct inheritance from a common ancestor, have played significant role in shaping prokaryotic genomes and are involved in gain or transfer of important biological processes. Whether LGT significantly contributed to the composition of an animal genome is currently unclear. In nematodes, multiple LGT are s...

Lipoprotein anchoring in bacteria is mediated by the prolipoprotein diacylglyceryl transferase (Lgt), which catalyzes the transfer of a diacylglyceryl moiety to the prospective N-terminal cysteine of the mature lipoprotein. Deletion of the lgt gene in the gram-positive pathogen Listeria monocytogenes (i) impairs intracellular growth of the bacterium in different eukaryotic cell lines and (ii) l...

The complex pattern of presence and absence of many genes across different species provides tantalising clues as to how genes evolved through the processes of gene genesis, gene loss, and lateral gene transfer (LGT). The extent of LGT, particularly in prokaryotes, and its implications for creating a 'network of life' rather than a 'tree of life' is controversial. In this paper, we formally mode...

Bacteria to eukaryote lateral gene transfers (LGT) are an important potential source of material for the evolution of novel genetic traits. The explosion in the number of newly sequenced genomes provides opportunities to identify and characterize examples of these lateral gene transfer events, and to assess their role in the evolution of new genes. In this paper, we describe an ancient lepidopt...

A major problem for inferring species trees from gene trees is that evolutionary processes can sometimes favor gene tree topologies that conflict with an underlying species tree. In the case of incomplete lineage sorting, this phenomenon has recently been well-studied, and some elegant solutions for species tree reconstruction have been proposed. One particularly simple and statistically consis...

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) from bacteria to animals occurs more frequently than was appreciated prior to the advent of genome sequencing. In 2007, LGT from bacterial Wolbachia endosymbionts was detected in ~33% of the sequenced arthropod genomes using a bioinformatic approach. Today, Wolbachia/host LGT is thought to be widespread and many other cases of bacteria-animal LGT have been described....

Our knowledge of the extent and functional impact of lateral gene transfer (LGT) from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, outside of endosymbiosis, is still rather limited. Here we review the recent literature, focusing mainly on microbial parasites, indicating that LGT from diverse prokaryotes has played a significant role in the evolution of a number of lineages, and by extension throughout eukaryotic...

Even in lieu of a dependable species concept for asexual organisms, the classification of bacteria into discrete taxonomic units is considered to be obstructed by the potential for lateral gene transfer (LGT) among lineages at virtually all phylogenetic levels. In most bacterial genomes, large proportions of genes are introduced by LGT, as indicated by their compositional features and/or phylog...

The present study was undertaken to examine the extent to which the lgt locus varies among strains of gonococci. This locus encodes five glycosyl transferases involved in the synthesis of the lipooligosaccharide (LOS) of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. We examined seven gonococcal strains and found that the structure of the lgt locus is conserved among six of these strains. The locus is strikingly alter...