Horizontal Gene Exchange in Environmental Microbiota
By R. Aminov. Front. Microbio., 2011
601 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays an important role in the evolution of life on the Earth. This view is supported by numerous occasions of HGT that are recorded in the genomes of all three domains of living organisms. HGT-mediated rapid evolution is especially noticeable among the Bacteria, which demonstrate formidable adaptability in the face of recent environmental changes imposed by human activities, such as the use of antibiotics, industrial contamination, and intensive agriculture. At the heart of the HGT-driven bacterial evolution and adaptation are highly sophisticated natural genetic engineering tools in the form of a variety of mobile genetic elements (MGEs). The main aim of this review is to give a brief account of the occurrence and diversity of MGEs in natural ecosystems and of the environmental factors that may affect MGE-mediated HGT.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58e8255af245bafaca390294fb009194b99acd56
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Citations in the corpus
- Antibiotic-Resistance Genes in Waste Water. (2017, background): “The high bacterial densities, biofilms, and stress caused by pollutant compounds, such as antibiotics, biocides, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals, can promote horizontal gene transfer in waste waters [5].”
- Antimicrobial Resistance and Virulence: a Successful or Deleterious Association in the Bacterial World? (2013, background): “The structure of biofilms promotes HGT, especially by conjugation, and because of the high density and close proximity of the cells, the conjugation itself can even stimulate biofilm production.”
- Antimicrobial Resistance in ESKAPE Pathogens (2020, background): “Plasmids are an important vehicle for gene transfer in both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria (289).”
- The Paradox of Mixed-Species Biofilms in the Context of Food Safety (2014, background): “Figure 5–Hypothetical representation of trispecies biofilm formation by L. monocytogenes, S. enterica, and E. coli, showing the main steps and the key factors involved on the 2 layers shown. The image was adapted from Almeida and others (2011), discriminating the multispecies populations in biofilms”
- IslandViewer 4: expanded prediction of genomic islands for larger-scale datasets (2017, neutral): “They are a major driver of genome evolution and are of particular interest since they often provide adaptive traits that enhance the fitness of bacteria and archaea within a niche (1,2).”