Earth’s first life forms eventually took one of three different paths, forming the domains of Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea. These domains have been evolving separately for billions of years.
Recent evidence suggests that the boundaries between the three domains are not so clean. Studies show that members of different domains can traffic genes back and forth, potentially fast-tracking evolution. How they do so remains unknown, but a study published today (November 16) in Science Advances provides a possible clue with the first report that archaea have integrons—gene exchange machinery previously thought only to exist in bacteria. This may allow microbes from the two domains to swap information and instantly acquire new functions.
“We’ve known for a while that there are a lot of genes that bacteria and archaea exchange,” says Olga Zhaxybayeva, an evolutionary biologist at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the study. If integrons turn out to ...
