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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Natural GMOs Part 149. Moss Harbors Foreign Genes

Land plants emerged around half a billion years ago, having evolved from green aquatic algae. Today, a representative of these early land-dwelling species—a moss—hints that genes from other kingdoms of life may have helped the ancient colonizers flourish on land.

Jinling Huang from East Carolina University studied the genome of the moss Physcomitrella patens and found 128 genes that originated in fungi, bacteria, and viruses, not other plants. The results, published today (23 October) in Nature Communications, suggest that much of P. patens’ genetic material resulted from horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes between species. This phenomenon is common among bacteria and other prokaryotes, but thought to be rare and relatively unimportant in eukaryotes like animals and plants....@ Moss Harbors Foreign Genes | The Scientist Magazine®:


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