Horizontal gene transfer within streptomycetes

Abstract

Currently, the wealth of data available for studying bacterial genotypes provided by genome sequencing has resulted in an increased interest in horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It appears that there has been considerably more gene flow horizontally than was first thought. The extent of HGT was reported in the case of E. coli and Salmonella enterica, where both lineages had each gained and lost more than 3Mb of novel DNA since their divergence some 100 million years ago.