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There's also a strong role for horizontal gene transfer in antibiotic resistance, e.g. by swapping plasmids, which can allow bacteria to swap higher-granularity
by mjn 13y ago
There's also a strong role for horizontal gene transfer in antibiotic resistance, e.g. by swapping plasmids, which can allow bacteria to swap higher-granularity mechanisms, rather than having to evolve them from scratch with random mutations.
- Peaker 13y agoThis feature is basically bacterial sex and turns their evolution from a slow serial computation to a highly parallel computation that gives an exponential speedup in evolution. I think this effect is the extremely under appreciated benefit of sex/exchanging dna.