Anachronistic evolution

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As anachronistic evolution the effects or the process of acquisition of be Erbmaterialresten a dead organism (even longer dead organisms), respectively. The anachronistic evolution was first published in 2013. Søren Overballe Petersen from the Center for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen coined the term .

General

Short and damaged remnants of DNA (fragmented DNA and aDNA ) are ubiquitous in the environment and can last for more than half a million years. Experiments have shown that bacteria can take up these DNA residues by transformation and incorporate them into their genome . Among other things, DNA remnants were transferred from the bones of a woolly mammoth that died 43,000 years ago .

The transmission of genetic material from an individual to offspring, the vertical gene transfer , is a normal part of evolution . The horizontal gene transfer , the transfer of one (adapted) organism in an existing other can one adapt speed to changing environmental conditions.

By resorting to foreign DNA, the evolution of bacteria can proceed even faster than with horizontal gene transfer alone and than one would expect only on the basis of natural mutations.

Other use

The term anachronistic evolution was used, with a different meaning, earlier by the British paleontologist Richard Barrie Rickards, who mainly researched graptolites . Anachronistic evolution in Rickard's sense means that organisms with certain characteristics sometimes appear in the fossil record , which are actually typical for groups that appear later (“heraldic”) or for groups from their relatives that have already died out earlier (“echoic”), and so on fake a longer existence of the respective group. This use of the term has nothing to do with gene transfer.

literature

  • Michael Marshall: DNA-grabbing bacteria hint at the early phase of evolution. In: New Scientist . Magazine issue 2936, online from September 26, 2013 ( PDF; 605 kB ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Søren Overballe-Petersen, Klaus Harms, Ludovic AA Orlando, J. Victor Moreno Mayar, Simon Rasmussen, Tais W. Dahl, Minik T. Rosing, Anthony M. Poole, Thomas Sicherheitsitz-Ponten, Søren Brunak, Sabrina Inselmann, Johann de Vries, Wilfried Wackernagel, Oliver G. Pybus, Rasmus Nielsen, Pål Jarle Johnsen, Kaare Magne Nielsen, and Eske Willerslev: Bacterial natural transformation by highly fragmented and damaged DNA. In: Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PNAS (2013). Volume 110, Issue 49. doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1315278110 , PMID 24248361 , PMC 3856829 (free full text), pp. 19860-19865.
  2. ↑ a b Lucien Haas: Bacteria can incorporate fossil DNA fragments into their genome. In: Deutschlandfunk . November 19, 2013, accessed March 16, 2019.
  3. ^ ENK Clarkson: Invertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken 2009, ISBN 978-1-444-31332-1 , p. 337.