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Bdelloid rotifer uses horizontal gene transfer (HGT), dispenses with sex

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Some of the ways that the rotifer keeps a healthy genome without sex were revealed by genome mapping. HGT is one such strategy:

If bdelloids are not having sex, how can they avoid the accumulation of deleterious mutations or generate new diversity? The bdelloid genome shows evidence for other ways of maintaining healthy genes and viable lineages. One is gene conversion, in which one allele replaces another through DNA repair mechanisms or other strategies. The other is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), the transfer of DNA from one organism to another, which is common among microbes yet rarely seen in animals. At least 8 percent of the rotifer’s genes, more than in any other animal, are likely to have been acquired by HGT.

Comments
I'm attempting to dispense with sex without using HGT.Mung
July 26, 2013
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Reminds me of this study: 70% of genes of a tick species are orphans, and have no trace of being descended from any other species' genes.
Why so many unknown genes? Partitioning orphans from a representative transcriptome of the lone star tick Amblyomma americanum - 2013 Genomic resources within the phylum Arthropoda are largely limited to the true insects but are beginning to include unexplored subphyla, such as the Crustacea and Chelicerata. Investigations of these understudied taxa uncover high frequencies of orphan genes, which lack detectable sequence homology to genes in pre-existing databases... The vast majority (71%) has no sequence homology to proteins archived in UniProtKB.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/14/135lifepsy
July 26, 2013
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OT: Well this is interesting. Physorg has an article up showing that the recent pig-chimp hybrid theory for human origins is much harder to shoot down than Darwinists had first supposed it would be: Human hybrids: a closer look at the theory and evidence - July 25, 2013 There was considerable fallout, both positive and negative, from our first story covering the radical pig-chimp hybrid theory put forth by Dr. Eugene McCarthy, a geneticist who's proposing that humans first arose from an ancient hybrid cross between pigs and chimpanzees. Despite the large number of comments, here at Phys.org, on macroevolution.net, and on several other discussion forums, little in the way of a scientific consensus has emerged. By and large, those coming out against the theory had surprisingly little science to offer in their sometimes personal attacks against McCarthy. ,,,Under the alternative hypothesis (humans are not pig-chimp hybrids), the assumption is that humans and chimpanzees are equally distant from pigs. You would therefore expect chimp traits not seen in humans to be present in pigs at about the same rate as are human traits not found in chimps. However, when he searched the literature for traits that distinguish humans and chimps, and compiled a lengthy list of such traits, he found that it was always humans who were similar to pigs with respect to these traits. This finding is inconsistent with the possibility that humans are not pig-chimp hybrids, that is, it rejects that hypothesis.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evidence.html The obvious question for me is, of course, since Darwinists are having such a hard time proving that we did not come from pig-chimp hybrids, what makes Darwinists so sure that we evolved from apes or anything else in the first place? Any reasonable person would realize that if such a dubious theory as the pig-chimp hybrid theory can cause such havoc, for what was suppose to be such well established science, then perhaps the Darwinian theory for human origins is not nearly as strong as Darwinists have dogmatically held it to be.bornagain77
July 25, 2013
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