Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
Department of Biological Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4295, USA.
Int J Mol Sci. 2009 Sep 3;10(9):3836-3860. doi: 10.3390/ijms10093836.
The role that reticulate evolution (i.e., via lateral transfer, viral recombination and/or introgressive hybridization) has played in the origin and adaptation of individual taxa and even entire clades continues to be tested for all domains of life. Though falsified for some groups, the hypothesis of divergence in the face of gene flow is becoming accepted as a major facilitator of evolutionary change for many microorganisms, plants and animals. Yet, the effect of reticulate evolutionary change in certain assemblages has been doubted, either due to an actual dearth of genetic exchange among the lineages belonging to these clades or because of a lack of appropriate data to test alternative hypotheses. Marine organisms represent such an assemblage. In the past half-century, some evolutionary biologists interested in the origin and trajectory of marine organisms, particularly animals, have posited that horizontal transfer, introgression and hybrid speciation have been rare. In this review, we provide examples of such genetic exchange that have come to light largely as a result of analyses of molecular markers. Comparisons among these markers and between these loci and morphological characters have provided numerous examples of marine microorganisms, plants and animals that possess the signature of mosaic genomes.
网状进化（例如横向转移、病毒重组和/或渐渗杂交）在个体分类群甚至整个进化枝的起源和适应中所起的作用，仍在对所有生命领域进行检验。尽管对于某些群体来说，基因流动下的分歧假说已经被证伪，但对于许多微生物、植物和动物来说，该假说正在被越来越多地接受为进化变化的主要促进因素。然而，由于属于这些进化枝的谱系之间实际上缺乏遗传交换，或者由于缺乏适当的数据来检验替代假说，某些组合中网状进化变化的影响一直受到怀疑。海洋生物就是这样一个组合。在过去的半个世纪里，一些对海洋生物，特别是动物的起源和轨迹感兴趣的进化生物学家假设，水平转移、渐渗和杂种形成很少发生。在这篇综述中，我们提供了由于分析分子标记而发现的此类遗传交换的例子。这些标记之间以及这些基因座与形态特征之间的比较，提供了大量具有镶嵌基因组特征的海洋微生物、植物和动物的例子。
