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Genomics
Published in Ronald Fayer, Lihua Xiao, Cryptosporidium and Cryptosporidiosis, 2007
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the acquisition of genetic material (genes or genome segments) from outside of the recipient cell. This is in contrast to intracellular gene transfer (IGT), in which genetic material is relocated within nuclear or organellar compartments in the same cell. Within the Apicomplexa, there is a significant amount of IGT that has been documented as transfers from the mitochondrion and apicoplast to the nuclear genome (Foth et al., 2003; Riordan et al., 2003; Huang et al., 2004b; Huang and Kissinger, 2006) as well as acquisition of plant-like genes, perhaps from the algal endosymbiont that gave rise to the apicoplast (Dzierszinski et al., 1999; Nagamune and Sibley, 2006). There are also numerous studies that have alluded to, or proven, instances of HGT to Cryptosporidium or its ancestor (Striepen et al., 2002, 2004; Huang et al., 2004a,2004b; Madern et al., 2004; Templeton et al., 2004a). In several cases, the consequences of these transfers have been investigated, and perhaps no metabolic pathways have been as significantly impacted as nucleotide biosynthesis and salvage.
Bioaugmentation: A Way Out for Remediation of Polluted Environments
Published in Rouf Ahmad Bhat, Moonisa Aslam Dervash, Khalid Rehman Hakeem, Khalid Zaffar Masoodi, Environmental Biotechnology, 2022
Mohammad Yaseen Mir, Saima Hamid, Gulab Khan Rohela
In bioaugmentation, it was found that the inoculated bacteria may not survive for a longer time, and there is a chance of horizontal gene transfer into natural microbial flora of contaminated location. Recent advances in DNA sequencing revealed the role of horizontal gene transfer in microbial evolution and adjusting the microbes to highly toxic environment (Ochman et al., 2000). The horizontal gene transfer occurs through mediation by bacteriophage (transduction), by uptake of naked DNA (transformation), or by conjugation, that is, exchange of DNA material such as transposons or plasmids between different bacteria.
Biosynthesis
Published in Volodymyr Ivanov, Environmental Microbiology for Engineers, 2020
A horizontal gene transfer is the transfer of genes by transformation or transduction between organisms that have distant, evolutionarily different genomes. The horizontal gene transfer occurs at low frequency in natural and engineering ecosystems. It allows a cell to acquire novel genetic trains from non-parental cells. Horizontal gene transfers between evolutionary distant prokaryotes created parallelism in the evolution of the prokaryotes of aquatic, terrestrial, and extremal environments.
An invisible workforce in soil: The neglected role of soil biofilms in conjugative transfer of antibiotic resistance genes
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2022
Shan Wu, Yichao Wu, Bin Cao, Qiaoyun Huang, Peng Cai
Microbes acquire and spread antibiotic resistance by genetic mutation and horizontal transfer of ARGs (Andersson & Hughes, 2014). The horizontal transfer of ARGs is the principle driving force for the development and accumulation of antibiotic resistance in the environment (Zhang et al., 2017). There are three major pathways of horizontal gene transfer: (1) conjugation, the transfer of mobile genetic elements such as plasmids, integrons, transposons, and insertion sequence, etc. from donor cells to recipient cells through direct physical contact, (2) transformation, the uptake of naked DNA by competent cells, and (3) transduction, the bacteriophage-mediated transfer of genetic information. Of these, conjugation is the primary mode of horizontal gene transfer in the environment (Thomas & Nielsen, 2005; Wang et al., 2015).
The primary molecular influences of marine plastisphere formation and function: Novel insights into organism -organism and -co-pollutant interactions
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2023
Charlotte E. Lee, Lauren F. Messer, Sophie I. Holland, Tony Gutierrez, Richard S. Quilliam, Sabine Matallana-Surget
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the exchange of genetic information between microorganisms for the benefit of the recipient, and often the entire microbial community (Falkowski et al., 2008). In the plastisphere, this increases the resistance of all microorganisms capable of HGT to stressors, including antibiotics (Yang et al., 2019; You et al., 2021). Potentially pathogenic bacteria have been of particular interest concerning the development of this antibiotic resistance (Metcalf et al., 2022; Radisic et al., 2020; Silva et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019; You et al., 2021). For example, Vibrionaceae can dominate a marine plastisphere (Delacuvellerie et al., 2022; Dussud et al., 2018), including V. cholerae (Silva et al., 2019), V. parahaemolyticus (Kirstein et al., 2018), V. anguillarum (Dussud et al., 2018), and V. vulnificus (Metcalf et al., 2022) which are often associated with water-borne diseases (Silva et al., 2019). As antibiotic resistance is promoted on the surface of plastic (Metcalf et al., 2022; Radisic et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2019), the virulence of these potentially pathogenic bacteria may also be increased. Concerningly, microplastics facilitate the transport of pathogenic bacteria throughout the water column and up the food chain once consumed by marine organisms (Mammo et al., 2020; Miller et al., 2020), and are therefore considered a significant risk to public health (Amelia et al., 2021). However, the virulence of these bacteria on plastic has not yet been confirmed (Delacuvellerie et al., 2022; Oberbeckmann et al., 2021), and needs to be further investigated.
A synthetic biology approach for the design of genetic algorithms with bacterial agents
Published in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 2021
A. Gargantilla Becerra, M. Gutiérrez, R. Lahoz-Beltra
Bacteria-inspired evolutionary algorithms arise from the need to resolve some of the distinctive setbacks of optimisation methods. At the end of the 90s of the last century, [1] introduced a Bacterial Evolutionary Algorithm with new genetic operators for the simulation of gene transfer and mutation, and [2] Microbial Genetic Algorithm, which includes a recombination operator inspired by bacterial conjugation. More recently, genetic algorithms were designed to solve specific optimisation problems with gene transfer operators and non-standard versions of genetic mutation operators, e.g. inverse mutation and pairwise interchange mutation [3]. The above algorithms illustrate some examples where bacteria provide a source of inspiration for new genetic operators. In fact, bacteria have the ability to transfer genes between individuals of the same generation, which is known as horizontal gene transfer. An example of horizontal gene transfer is the bacterial conjugation mechanism. For instance, [4] introduced a bacterial conjugation operator showing its usefulness in the design of an AM radio receiver. Afterwards other bacterial conjugation operators were introduced [5], exploring the possibility of incorporating physiological behaviours of bacteria into an evolutionary algorithm. For example [6] incorporates the chemotactic behaviour of E. coli bacteria which is one of the main steps in the Bacterial Foraging Optimisation Algorithm [7], which is one of the most distinctive bacteria-inspired algorithms. New versions of evolutionary algorithms based on bacteria are designed by their hybridisation with other techniques, e.g. the Bacterial Memetic Algorithm [8] includes local search methods, particularly the Levenberg-Marquardt method.