No sex, but plenty of gene transfer
Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 16:35
in Biology & Nature
A laboratory culture of the bdelloid rotifer Adineta vaga. Rotifers may be able to incorporate DNA from other species into their genomes during the desiccation and rehydration phases of their life cycle. Credit: Eugene Gladyshev Where do you get your genes? If you are an animal, you inherit them from your parents at the moment of conception, and that's about it. No later incorporation of environmental DNA for you, unless you become host to a parasite or an endosymbiont that somehow transfers bits of its genome into yours (which is a rarely documented event).