{"id":123601,"date":"2021-06-09T11:22:37","date_gmt":"2021-06-09T18:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/dna-jumps-between-animal-species-no-one-knows-how-often"},"modified":"2021-06-09T11:22:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T18:22:37","slug":"dna-jumps-between-animal-species-no-one-knows-how-often","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/dna-jumps-between-animal-species-no-one-knows-how-often","title":{"rendered":"DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dna-jumps-between-animal-species-no-one-knows-how-often2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dbms.queensu.ca\/faculty\/laurie-graham\">Laurie Graham<\/a>, a molecular biologist at Queen\u2019s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she\u2019s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn\u2019t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.<\/p>\n<p>Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals \u2014 other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals \u2014 point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reed.edu\/biology\/professors\/schaack.html\">Sarah Schaack<\/a>, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have \u201ca pretty big wow factor\u201d even among scientists, \u201cbecause the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.\u201d But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen\u2019s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she\u2019s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn\u2019t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}