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Genome-Wide Experimental Determination of Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer
Rotem Sorek,1,2Yiwen Zhu,2Christopher J. Creevey,3M. Pilar Francino,1Peer Bork,3Edward M. Rubin1,2*
Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferredfrom the genome of one organism to that of another, has beeninvestigated in microbial species mainly through computationalsequence analyses. To address the lack of experimental data,we studied the attempted movement of 246,045 genes from 79 prokaryoticgenomes into Escherichia coli and identified genes that consistentlyfail to transfer. We studied the mechanisms underlying transferinhibition by placing coding regions from different speciesunder the control of inducible promoters. Our data suggest thattoxicity to the host inhibited transfer regardless of the speciesof origin and that increased gene dosage and associated increasedexpression may be a predominant cause for transfer failure.Although these experimental studies examined transfer solelyinto E. coli, a computational analysis of gene-transfer ratesacross available bacterial and archaeal genomes supports thatthe barriers observed in our study are general across the treeof life.
1 Department of Energy, Joint Genome Institute, 2800 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, USA. 2 Genome Sciences Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. 3 European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69012 Heidelberg, Germany.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: EMRubin{at}lbl.gov
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