Selfish DNA, symbionts and parasites – some quick links

I was at a committee meeting yesterday for a great PhD student here at UC Davis, Michael Hornsby and the topic of selfish DNA came up.  After his meeting we sat down and looked for some new papers and review papers on the topic.  I just thought it might be of value to share some of these here:

We also discussed briefly the evolution of mutualists and parasites and here are a few papers that came up:

If anyone knows of any other good recent papers or blog posts about selfish DNA or mutualists vs. parasites please post them here.  Thanks
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

5 thoughts on “Selfish DNA, symbionts and parasites – some quick links”

  1. Completely selfish reasoning, but I don't think any analysis of selfish DNA is complete without considering mobile introns and their relatives 🙂

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18680436
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19617525
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16093712

    The focus is pretty heavy on prokaryotic/eukaryotic transition these days, but considering how many of these mobile introns show up in conjugation and gene-transfer cassettes, I'd include them.

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  2. Hi Jonathan, we've had our heads buried on this topic for a bit, with a focus on obligate intracellular bacteria. Here are some links:

    Correlations between bacterial ecology and mobile DNA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20577742

    Mobile DNA in obligate intracellular bacteria.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16138097

    Phage WO of Wolbachia: lambda of the endosymbiont world.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20083406

    Complete bacteriophage transfer in a bacterial endosymbiont (Wolbachia) determined by targeted genome capture.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21292630

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