traductor

domingo, 26 de abril de 2015

Evolving new organisms via symbiosis

  • PERSPECTIVE
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Evolving new organisms via symbiosis

  1. Stuart A. West2
+Author Affiliations
  1. 1Institute of Ecological Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands.
  2. 2Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.
  1. E-mail: toby.kiers@vu.nl
Symbiotic partnerships are a major source of evolutionary innovation. They have driven rapid diversification of organisms, allowed hosts to harness new forms of energy, and radically modified Earth's nutrient cycles. The application of next-generation sequencing and advanced microscopic techniques has revealed not only the ubiquity of symbiotic partnerships, but the extent to which partnerships can become physically, genomically, and metabolically integrated (1). When and why does this integration of once free-living organisms happen?

No hay comentarios: