Contributed talk in Biological Systems 3, Aug. 2, 2019, 2:30 p.m. in room USB.2.022

Horizontal Gene Transfer Leads to Increased Task Acquisition and Genomic Modularity in Digital Organisms

Michael Wiser, Rosangela Canino-Koning, Charles Ofria

watch Publication Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is a pervasive force in bacteria. The evolutionary impacts of HGT on genome organization, modularity, and evolvability have long been a topic of debate among biologists. However, the very ubiquity of HGT makes it exceptionally difficult to study in organic systems, as it nearly impossible to elimincate it from a control. Here, we make use of digital evolution to study the impacts of allowing or disallowing HGT events. We find that in a cyclic changing environment, populations evolved with HGT present acquire more tasks than when HGT is prohibited. Further, the resulting genomes are more modular, with greater separation of tasks within the genome. These results suggest that HGT itself may be responsible for some of the striking differences between bacterial and eukaryotic genomes.