Plants and animals sometimes take genes from bacteria, study of algae suggests

In 2015, after analyses of millions of protein sequences across many species, William Martin, a biologist at the University of Dusseldorf (UD) in Germany, and colleagues concluded in Nature that there is no significant ongoing transfer of prokaryotic genes into eukaryotes. Debashish Bhattacharya, an evolutionary genomicist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and UD plant biochemist Andreas Weber took a closer look at a possible case of bacteria-to-eukaryote gene transfer that Martin has challenged. Others argue that gene transfer to eukaryotes is so rare, and the pressure to get rid of any but the most important borrowed genes is so strong, that transferred genes might not accumulate over time as Martin expects.

Source: www.sciencemag.org