DNA passed to and from all kinds of organisms, even across kingdoms, has helped shape the tree of life, to a large and undisputed degree in microbes and also unexpectedly in multicellular fungi, ...

Marine animals, such as the extremely simple flatworm Trichoplax, are ideal model organisms for studying the early ...

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a microbial community phenomenon that essentially equates to teaching neighbors how to complete necessary tasks by ripping out and sharing ...

Microbes move across the planet, linking ecosystems and spreading genes that shape antibiotic resistance, health, and biodiversity.

With more than 50,000 described species, the leaf beetle family is distributed worldwide and represents about a quarter of the species diversity of all herbivores. Leaf beetles can be found to feed on ...

Researchers have discovered a new mode of vertical mother-to-infant microbiome transmission, where microbes in the maternal gut shared genes with microbes in the infant gut during the perinatal period ...

Viruses attack nearly every living organism on Earth. To do so, they rely on highly specialized proteins that recognize and ...

When the human genome was first published, the suggestion that it contained bacterial genes was controversial. Subsequent studies questioned the possibility of HGT, offering alternate explanations for ...

An introner jumped between this species, a glass sponge, and an unrelated species of marine protist called a dinoflagellate. Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, ...

A new study has shown that virus-like transposons, called Mavericks, are responsible for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in nematodes. Researchers led by Alejandro Burga at the Austrian Academy of ...