3 ms·
I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that bacteria are much more likely to undergo horizontal gene transfer when undress stress. (Particularly troubling
by reubenswartz 6y ago
I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that bacteria are much more likely to undergo horizontal gene transfer when undress stress. (Particularly troubling these days for antibiotic resistance.)
Seems like it would be a natural next step for single cell eukaryotes to have a similar mechanism to fix bad DNA, especially given the much longer genomes of eukaryotes, which the article discusses without mentioning bacteria.
By the time you get to multicellular creatures, this gets even more important and leads to males, who pass on only nuclear DNA, and females, who pass one nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.
- koeng 6y agoEukaryotes don’t really evolve very much on the protein level - their complexity allows them to mostly evolve on the regulatory level (while bacteria often still are on the protein level). Practically, this means that getting proteins from elsewhere isn’t that selected for, while better regulation is. It’s a complicated subject, but that’s partially why there is so much “junk” dna in multicellular eukaryotes (single cellular like yeast are still pretty efficient)
- reubenswartz 6y agoMy primitive understanding is that the bottleneck for bacterial reproduction is DNA replication, so there’s a huge incentive to shed unneeded DNA, especially with mechanisms to get genes back via HGT. Am I right in thinking that the more efficient chromosome replication in eukaryotes doesn’t penalize junk dna the same way, so it can just stick around?