Boyce Thompson Institute, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA.
Plant Biology Section, Cornell University, New York, NY, 14853, USA.
New Phytol. 2020 Jan;225(1):113-117. doi: 10.1111/nph.16022. Epub 2019 Jul 26.
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has long been seen as a crucial process in the evolution of prokaryotic species, but until recently it was thought to have little, if any, effect on the evolution of eukaryotic life forms. Detecting and describing HGT events in eukaryotes is difficult, making this phenomenon at times controversial. However, modern advances in genomics and bioinformatics have radically altered our view of HGT in eukaryotes, especially in plants. It now appears that HGT to and from plant lineages is more common than previously suspected. Importantly, the transfer of functional nuclear genes with adaptive significance has been reported in numerous taxa. Here we review several recent studies that have found evidence of the horizontal transfer of nuclear genes, and argue that HGT has undoubtedly had profound impacts on plant evolution as a whole.
水平基因转移（HGT）长期以来一直被视为原核物种进化过程中的关键过程，但直到最近，人们认为它对真核生物形式的进化几乎没有影响，如果有的话。在真核生物中检测和描述 HGT 事件很困难，这使得这一现象有时存在争议。然而，基因组学和生物信息学的现代进展彻底改变了我们对真核生物中 HGT 的看法，尤其是在植物中。现在看来，来自和去往植物谱系的 HGT 比以前怀疑的更为普遍。重要的是，具有适应意义的功能核基因的转移已在众多分类群中得到报道。在这里，我们回顾了几项最近的研究，这些研究发现了核基因水平转移的证据，并认为 HGT 无疑对整个植物进化产生了深远的影响。
