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:
- The Myth … of the Myth of Junk DNA (blog post by John Farrell)
- A formal theory of the selfish gene
- Capturing the superorganism: a formal theory of group adaptation.
- Bacterial toxin-antitoxin systems: more than selfish entities?
- Genomic islands: tools of bacterial horizontal gene transfer and evolution.
- A Brief History of the Status of Transposable Elements: From Junk DNA to Major Players in Evolution
- What traits are carried on mobile genetic elements, and why?
We also discussed briefly the evolution of mutualists and parasites and here are a few papers that came up:
- Genomics and evolution of heritable bacterial symbionts.
- From parasite to mutualist: rapid evolution of Wolbachia in natural populations of Drosophila.
If anyone knows of any other good recent papers or blog posts about selfish DNA or mutualists vs. parasites please post them here. Thanks
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 