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Shuffling bacterial metabolomes

Brendan Thomason and Timothy D Read*

Author Affiliations

Biological Defense Research Directorate, Naval Medical Research Center, 12300 Washington Avenue, Rockville, MD 20852, USA.

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Genome Biology 2006, 7:204 doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-2-204

Published: 27 February 2006

Abstract

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has a far more significant role than gene duplication in bacterial evolution. This has recently been illustrated by work demonstrating the importance of HGT in the emergence of bacterial metabolic networks, with horizontally acquired genes being placed in peripheral pathways at the outer branches of the networks.