this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Biodiversity

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Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.

Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...

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Cockroaches scurry around with thousands of pieces of bacterial genomes (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/biodiversity@mander.xyz
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Another reason horizontal gene transfer is a big factor among microbes is that they lack dedicated germ cells. If foreign DNA gets incorporated into the genome of any cell, it will be inherited by any descendants of that cell. In contrast, in multicellular animals, any foreign DNA incorporated into the genome of a liver cell will not be inherited by anything. So, you not only have to get the foreign DNA into the nucleus, but it also needs to get into the nucleus of the right cell.

Horizontal gene transfer in complex, multicellular animals was expected to be rare. When researchers started sequencing animal genomes, they found lots of bits of viruses scattered throughout most of them. But they didn’t find many pieces of bacterial DNA. That was partly because the software that assembled the genome from individual fragments of genome sequence was made to treat bacterial sequence as contamination. That is not unreasonable, given that we were typically growing up lots of copies of the animal DNA by placing it in bacteria.

Since then, we’ve developed techniques that allow us to sequence DNA without growing lots of copies in bacteria. We’ve also got the ability to obtain sequence-extended fragments of DNA, sometimes many thousands of bases long. These “long read” DNA sequences will often cover both borders where the bacterial sequence meets the animal sequence, making clear that the bacterial version wasn’t the result of contamination.

link to open access paper https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2604240123

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