Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as one of the most urgent public health challenges of the twenty first century. Now, a new study shows that even very small amounts of antibiotics that ...

The movement or acquisition of genetic material between organisms that is not the result of vertical inheritance (reproduction) is called horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer. Horizontal gene ...

Like most bacteria, Vibrio cholerae lives under constant attack from viruses. To survive, bacteria equip themselves with antiviral immune systems. Previous work showed that V. cholerae carries a large ...

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 ...

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 ...