Projekt

All of life must undergo recombination to avoid extinction by Muller's ratchet, i.e., the accumulation of deleterious alleles during clonal growth. Yet the ways in which DNA substrates meet for recombination in prokaryotes (transduction, conjugation and transformation) versus eukaryotic cells (syngamy and karyogamy) share no homology. The sum consequence of those differences is sex. The purpose of the proposed project is to deliver a unified model for recombination in life. This requires three advances: (1) a computational model for the processes in nature that underlie the distribution of genes across prokaryotic genomes; (2) an understanding of the origin of sex that incorporates crucial new findings from evolutionary microbiology: the host that acquired the mitochondrion was an archaeon (no classical theory for the origin of sex takes that into account); and (3) integration of the origin of vertical eukaryotic inheritance before the backdrop of lateral recombination among prokaryotes. Only by integrating gene transfer, population genetics, and endosymbiosis into a unified recombination framework, computational models able to predict the fundamental differences in gene distribution that are observed across the prokaryote-eukaryote divide can be obtained.

• Prof. Dr. Martin Lercher

  Universität Düsseldorf
  Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät
  Institut für Informatik
  Arbeitsgruppe für Computergestützte Zellbiologie
  Geb. 25.02.02
  Düsseldorf
  

• Prof. Dr. Eörs Szathmary

  Parmenides Foundation
  Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science
  Pullach
  

• Prof. Dr. William Martin

  Universität Düsseldorf
  Biologie
  Institut für Molekulare Evolution
  Düsseldorf
  

• The last universal common ancestor between ancient Earth chemistry and the onset of genetics

• From self-replication to replicator systems en route to de novo life

• Each of 3,323 metabolic innovations in the evolution of E. coli arose through the horizontal transfer of a single DNA segment

• Evolution of linkage and genome expansion of protocells: the origin of chromosomes

• Evidence for a syncytial origin of eukaryotes from ancestral state reconstruction