TY - JOUR
T1 - Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology
AU - Chia, Nicholas
AU - Goldenfeld, Nigel
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank Ed DeLong, Carl Woese and Nicholas Guttenberg for valuable discussions, and Pan-Jun Kim and Zhenyu Wang for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation through grant NSF-EF-0526747.
PY - 2011/4
Y1 - 2011/4
N2 - The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living cells communicate genetically through transferred genes, as well as the ways in which they can reorganize their genomes in response to environmental pressure. We discuss how genome evolution can be thought of as related to the physical phenomenon of annealing, and describe the sense in which genomes can be said to exhibit an analogue of information entropy. As a direct application of these ideas, we analyze the variation with ocean depth of transposons in marine microbial genomes, predicting trends that are consistent with recent observations using metagenomic surveys.
AB - The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living cells communicate genetically through transferred genes, as well as the ways in which they can reorganize their genomes in response to environmental pressure. We discuss how genome evolution can be thought of as related to the physical phenomenon of annealing, and describe the sense in which genomes can be said to exhibit an analogue of information entropy. As a direct application of these ideas, we analyze the variation with ocean depth of transposons in marine microbial genomes, predicting trends that are consistent with recent observations using metagenomic surveys.
KW - Evolution
KW - Horizontal gene transfer
KW - Metagenomics
KW - Mobile genetic elements
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U2 - 10.1007/s10955-010-0112-8
DO - 10.1007/s10955-010-0112-8
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:79954628103
SN - 0022-4715
VL - 142
SP - 1287
EP - 1301
JO - Journal of Statistical Physics
JF - Journal of Statistical Physics
IS - 6
ER -