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So I agree with you in broad strokes but I want to nit-pick some meanings here. >It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only th

So I agree with you in broad strokes but I want to nit-pick some meanings here. >It still seems extremely unlikely, however we lack a good sense of not only the frequency of such events (presumably quite low), but also the total number which have occurred over evolutionary history. I think we have plentiful evidence for horizontal gene transfer, especially in bacteria (see "F-plasmids"). More relevant is all the endogenous retroviral sequences buried in our own DNA, all of which are effectively horizontal gene transfer between viruses and our ancestors. We know quite a bit about these random chunks of DNA so I am hesitant to call HGT either nascent or unlikely. Between seeing all the viral DNA and knowing roughly how fast mutations erase it, we can probably get a good estimate of how frequently it occurs. But, I totally agree that this is all very unlikely. At least, HGT events are rare on human timescales. But they do seem to be somewhat common on evolutionary timescales! Sometimes I wish I could see our biosphere in 1000 years time. It would be a radically weird place.

murphyslab 5y ago
I think that you missed my point. I was only speaking about animal-to-animal HGT, which was the essence of the : > Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer It was a response to your original statement: > This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer. I am aware of HGT within bacteria and viral domains. Science has done more to study those domains in part because the genomes are much smaller and are more plentiful. Additionally, for species within Kingdom Animalia, biologists have turned toward DNA Barcoding as an identifier rather than whole genome sequencing, which functionally limits the data available for investigation of such anomalies. Hence we really don't have good data on HGT between animal species.

murphyslab 5y ago

I think that you missed my point. I was only speaking about animal-to-animal HGT, which was the essence of the : > Only last year did scientists first supply solid evidence of animal-to-animal horizontal gene transfer It was a response to your original statement: > This is no more likely than for other fish to get the same gene from the original jellyfish humans found it in. Unless there are close relatives of zebrafish in those streams which can cross-breed with the zebrafish, there is no chance of gene transfer. I am aware of HGT within bacteria and viral domains. Science has done more to study those domains in part because the genomes are much smaller and are more plentiful. Additionally, for species within Kingdom Animalia, biologists have turned toward DNA Barcoding as an identifier rather than whole genome sequencing, which functionally limits the data available for investigation of such anomalies. Hence we really don't have good data on HGT between animal species.