No sex, but plenty of gene transfer
Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 15:21
in Biology & Nature
Where do you get your genes? If you are an animal, you inherit them from your parents at the moment of conception, and that's about it. No later incorporation of environmental DNA for you, unless you become host to a parasite or an endosymbiont that somehow transfers bits of its genome into yours (which is a rarely documented event). Unless you are a bdelloid rotifer, that is.