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Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation
Many bacteria are highly sexual, but the reasons for their promiscuity remain obscure. Did bacterial sex evolve to maximize diversity and facilitate adaptation in a changing world, or does it instead help to retain the bacterial functions that work right now? In other words, is bacterial sex innovat...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5031613/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27619692 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0528 |
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author | Ambur, Ole Herman Engelstädter, Jan Johnsen, Pål J. Miller, Eric L. Rozen, Daniel E. |
author_facet | Ambur, Ole Herman Engelstädter, Jan Johnsen, Pål J. Miller, Eric L. Rozen, Daniel E. |
author_sort | Ambur, Ole Herman |
collection | PubMed |
description | Many bacteria are highly sexual, but the reasons for their promiscuity remain obscure. Did bacterial sex evolve to maximize diversity and facilitate adaptation in a changing world, or does it instead help to retain the bacterial functions that work right now? In other words, is bacterial sex innovative or conservative? Our aim in this review is to integrate experimental, bioinformatic and theoretical studies to critically evaluate these alternatives, with a main focus on natural genetic transformation, the bacterial equivalent of eukaryotic sexual reproduction. First, we provide a general overview of several hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the evolution of transformation. Next, we synthesize a large body of evidence highlighting the numerous passive and active barriers to transformation that have evolved to protect bacteria from foreign DNA, thereby increasing the likelihood that transformation takes place among clonemates. Our critical review of the existing literature provides support for the view that bacterial transformation is maintained as a means of genomic conservation that provides direct benefits to both individual bacterial cells and to transformable bacterial populations. We examine the generality of this view across bacteria and contrast this explanation with the different evolutionary roles proposed to maintain sex in eukaryotes. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Weird sex: the underappreciated diversity of sexual reproduction’. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5031613 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50316132016-10-19 Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation Ambur, Ole Herman Engelstädter, Jan Johnsen, Pål J. Miller, Eric L. Rozen, Daniel E. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci Articles Many bacteria are highly sexual, but the reasons for their promiscuity remain obscure. Did bacterial sex evolve to maximize diversity and facilitate adaptation in a changing world, or does it instead help to retain the bacterial functions that work right now? In other words, is bacterial sex innovative or conservative? Our aim in this review is to integrate experimental, bioinformatic and theoretical studies to critically evaluate these alternatives, with a main focus on natural genetic transformation, the bacterial equivalent of eukaryotic sexual reproduction. First, we provide a general overview of several hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the evolution of transformation. Next, we synthesize a large body of evidence highlighting the numerous passive and active barriers to transformation that have evolved to protect bacteria from foreign DNA, thereby increasing the likelihood that transformation takes place among clonemates. Our critical review of the existing literature provides support for the view that bacterial transformation is maintained as a means of genomic conservation that provides direct benefits to both individual bacterial cells and to transformable bacterial populations. We examine the generality of this view across bacteria and contrast this explanation with the different evolutionary roles proposed to maintain sex in eukaryotes. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Weird sex: the underappreciated diversity of sexual reproduction’. The Royal Society 2016-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC5031613/ /pubmed/27619692 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0528 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Articles Ambur, Ole Herman Engelstädter, Jan Johnsen, Pål J. Miller, Eric L. Rozen, Daniel E. Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title | Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title_full | Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title_fullStr | Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title_full_unstemmed | Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title_short | Steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
title_sort | steady at the wheel: conservative sex and the benefits of bacterial transformation |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5031613/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27619692 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0528 |
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