Transgenic Relatives

Shestakov Sergey

How do organisms acquire principally new qualities that are the “material” for natural selection? Several decades ago the only answer to this question could be: “as a result of mutations”. But gradual accumulation of ordinary natural mutations takes too much time.

At the dawn of life, when life was asexual, natural transgenesis was one of the main ways of fast and radical modification of living creatures, i.e., the method of horizontal transfer of genes between unrelated organisms that even could belong to different kingdoms! Life has evolved and become more complicated, but this way of transferring genetic information has not lost its importance for microbes (and gene engineers!).

Comparative genetic analysis shows that all of us – animals, plants, and bacteria – can be considered as “horizontal” relatives, since we carry foreign genes. What is the share of “foreign genes” in already decoded genomes? What benefits can an organism derive from natural transgenesis? Can you acquire foreign genes by eating a transgenic pear? Academician Sergey Shestakov, a well-known Russian geneticist, provides answers to these and other related questions..