Biology's next revolution

Abstract

The interpretation of recent environmental genomics data exposes the far-reaching influence of horizontal gene transfer, and is changing our basic concepts of organism, species and evolution itself.

Slightly expanded version of invited essay published in Nature. The most important addition is a complete set of references that could not be included in the published version due to space limitations and acknowledgment of the grant that supported our work

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• Towards physical principles of biological evolution
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• Simple model for the Darwinian transition in early evolution
• Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology
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• Giant number fluctuations in microbial ecologies
• Lambda-prophage induction modeled as a cooperative failure mode of lytic repression