Some further reflections for Sal Cordova on horizontal gene transfer, with apologies for less than ideal sound. After commenting on a livestream (Examining Evolution) about mitochondrial genomes and their genomic relationships with the nuclear genome, I did some further reading. I threw together just a few examples to show that transfer of genetic material between organelles is not as infrequent as once believed. In this case I am talking about the frequency for which pieces of the nuclear genome have been integrated into the nuclear genome. All humans have multiple pieces of our mtDNA integrated into our nucleus and if one doubts the origin of those fragments one only has to look to small groups of people that share rare insertions of mtDNA and even within a single individual to see that such integrations are happing today. These present and past transfers of genetic information are so pervasive in some groups that they can be used as characters to derive nested hierarchies of descendants of those insertion events.
Note: I didn’t have my primary microphone on and so the recording is from my laptop microphone.
If this topic is interesting to some of you let me know and I might put together and more profession overview of Numt’s with additional examples.
Link to Sal and Rebekah’s conversation that inspired this video: https://youtu.be/ZafAvCYb7Kk
source
Horizontal Gene Transfer: Examples of MtDNA to nuDNA (NUMTs)
