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Mosaic bacterial chromosomes: a challenge en route to a tree of genomes
Author(s) -
Martin William
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
bioessays
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.175
H-Index - 184
eISSN - 1521-1878
pISSN - 0265-9247
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1521-1878(199902)21:2<99::aid-bies3>3.0.co;2-b
Subject(s) - genome , biology , gene , genetics , bacterial genome size , divergence (linguistics) , mosaic , evolutionary biology , geography , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology
In a recent analysis J.G. Lawrence and H. Ochman [Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1998;95:9413–9417 (Reference 1)] surmised that about 10% of the current E. coli genome consists of genes that were acquired in over 200 events of lateral gene transfer, which occurred subsequent to the divergence of E. coli and Salmonella some 100 million years ago. Overall, the data suggest that no less than 18% of E. coli 's genes might be relatively recent foreign acquisitions, and that the average rate of acquisition may be close to about 16 kb per million years. These quantitative estimates of comparatively recent genome flux have profound impact on evolutionary genome comparisons. They tend to suggest that a search should be on to identify principles that might ultimately govern gene distribution patterns across prokaryotic genomes. BioEssays 1999; 21:99–104. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.