August 30, 2007

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Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the entire genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The finding, reported in today's Science, suggests that lateral gene transfer--the movement of genes between unrelated species--may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution. Full Story

Source
University of Rochester

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