We investigate the generation and decay of interspecific disequilibrium (ID) between organelle and symbiont genomes as a function of the rate of horizontal transmission. We show that rare horizontal transmission greatly diminishes the covariance between organelle and symbiont genomes. This result has two important implications. First, a low level of ID does not indicate low levels of vertical t...

Integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs) are widespread mobile DNA that transmit both vertically, in a host-integrated state, and horizontally, through excision and transfer to new recipients. Different families of ICEs have been discovered with more or less restricted host ranges, which operate by similar mechanisms but differ in regulatory networks, evolutionary origin and the types of var...

Early male-killing (MK) bacteria are vertically transmitted reproductive parasites which kill male offspring that inherit them. Whereas their incidence is well documented, characteristics allowing originally non-MK bacteria to gradually evolve MK ability remain unclear. We show that horizontal transmission is a mechanism enabling vertically transmitted bacteria to evolve fully efficient MK unde...

Music, like languages, is one of the key components of our culture, yet musical evolution is still poorly known. Numerous studies using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology have been successfully applied to varied subset of linguistic data. One of the major drawback regarding musical studies is the lack of suitable coded musical data that can be analysed using such evolutiona...

Horizontal transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV) among hospital patients and medical staff has been well documented.1, 2) In most instances, HBV infection simply results in elevated antibody titers to HBV without any clinical symptoms, though fatal, fulminant hepatitis results in rare cases.3) The major route of the horizontal transmission of HBV is contact with infected blood.4) Minor routes...

Under constant light-adapted conditions, vision seems to be rather linear. However, the processes underlying the synaptic transmission between cones and second-order neurons (bipolar cells and horizontal cells) are highly nonlinear. In this paper, the gain-characteristics of the transmission from cones to horizontal cells and from horizontal cells to cones are determined with and without negati...

BACKGROUND A host obtains symbionts by horizontal transmission when infected from the environment or contagiously from other hosts in the same generation. In contrast, vertical transmission occurs when a host obtains its symbionts directly from its parents. Either vertical or horizontal transmission can sustain an association between a host and its symbiont. QUESTIONS What evolutionary forces...