oxysporum’s 15 chromosomes have been acquired through HGT from a fungal source (Ma et al., 2010). One of these chromosomes (chromosome 14) is essential

for pathogenicity of tomato plants (Ma et al., 2010). Using a simple co-incubation procedure, the authors demonstrated that chromosome 14 could be transferred between different F. oxysporum’s strains converting nonpathogenic strains into a pathogenic strains (Ma et al., 2010). Initially, a large proportion of documented HGT events into fungi involved bacterial Navitoclax donors (Table 1). This phenomenon may be due to the fact that bacterial HGT events are easier to detect than eukaryotic transfers. Furthermore, the majority of systematic fungal genomic HGT searches performed to date have only searched for genes from a bacterial source (Hall et al., 2005; Fitzpatrick et al., 2008; Marcet-Houben & Gabaldon, 2010). Ignoring these experimental biases, there are a number of biological reasons why prokaryote to fungal HGT is more likely than eukaryotic to fungal HGT. First, eukaryotic genes contain introns, and incorrect

spicing of these could act as a barrier for eukaryotic to eukaryotic HGT (this may not be an issue between Selleckchem Cobimetinib closely related eukaryotes where intron structure and position are highly conserved (Stajich et al., 2007)). Secondly, the number and diversity of bacterial populations is considerably larger than that of eukaryotic populations; therefore, the pool of bacterial genes available in the environment is significantly larger (Keeling & Palmer, 2008). Another factor to be considered is the observation that bacteria contain operons of functionally related genes, meaning that the transfer of a relatively small segment of DNA from bacteria to fungi could result in the gain of a complete metabolic pathway. Whole metabolic pathway transfer from bacteria to fungi has yet to be discovered; however, a recent analysis reported that two of the six genes (BIO3 and BIO4) of the S. cerevisiae biotin pathway have been acquired through HGT from a bacterial source (Hall & Dietrich, 2007).

Recent analyses have Avelestat (AZD9668) started to locate fungal to fungal interspecies HGTs (Table 1). Interestingly, a number of these studies have uncovered evidence of horizontal transfer of entire metabolic pathways whose genes are clustered within the donor genome (Temporini & VanEtten, 2004; Khaldi et al., 2008; Mallet et al., 2010; Khaldi & Wolfe, 2011; Slot & Rokas, 2011). For example, Slot and Rokas recently showed that a ~57-kb genomic region containing all 23 genes of the sterigmatocystin (toxic secondary metabolite) pathway has been transferred from Aspergillus nidulans to Podospora anserina (Slot & Rokas, 2011). Very few incidences of eukaryote (nonfungal) to fungal HGT have been located; however, a recent phylogenomic analysis has located four plant to fungi transfers (Richards et al., 2009). Resolving the tree of life is a fundamental goal of biology.