Thank you Rashid!

This is indeed an excellent question. To my knowledge  nearly nothing has been done experimentally on such gene transfer Systems. From sequencing studies, we know however that gene transfer from bacteria to fungi indeed plays a role during evolution. Think about penicillin synthesis and other, less spectecular examples. A laboratory system would be nice, but nothing reasonable has yet been established. There are, however, fungi that are really micocosms of bacteria living inside fungi. The best observations I know, are certainly spores of Glomus-like fungi, where a lot of bacteria live inside the spores and sometimes even other fungi. And there is the Rhizopus story with Burkholderia (from the Pseudomonas kinship) bacteria living inside the mycelium and producing a toxin. I am convinced, there must be more in nature.

Do you intend to look for that. I am highly interested to learn more and like to encourage you. In the laboratory, fungi are definitely capable to undergo conjugation-mediated gene Transfer. This has been shown for Saccharomyces cerevisiae long ago and, in Addition, several colleagues make use of the Agrobacterium system for introcing DNA into fungi.

There are certainly mechanisms that cope with incoming DNA in a way that iactivates it, sometimes by very intriguing and complicated mechanisms. This is at least true for Mucor-like fungi, that I have favoured for many years, especially Absidia and Parasitella.

Sincerely - Johannes W.

There is a phenomenon known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Quite a few reports are available on HGT between fungi and bacteria (and other organisms):

http://www.nature.com/news/fungi-borrowed-bacterial-gene-again-and-again-1.15496

http://eprintsprod.nuim.ie/3037/1/DF_Horizontal.pdf

http://people.ufpr.br/~microgeral/arquivos/transferenciagenicaemfungos.pdf

... just for starters...

Enjoy!

@Olga: thanks for your suggested reading;

i obviously know about HGT, but read mainly about bacteria; thanks for sharing these papers.

Rashid

Thank you Rashid!

This is indeed an excellent question. To my knowledge  nearly nothing has been done experimentally on such gene transfer Systems. From sequencing studies, we know however that gene transfer from bacteria to fungi indeed plays a role during evolution. Think about penicillin synthesis and other, less spectecular examples. A laboratory system would be nice, but nothing reasonable has yet been established. There are, however, fungi that are really micocosms of bacteria living inside fungi. The best observations I know, are certainly spores of Glomus-like fungi, where a lot of bacteria live inside the spores and sometimes even other fungi. And there is the Rhizopus story with Burkholderia (from the Pseudomonas kinship) bacteria living inside the mycelium and producing a toxin. I am convinced, there must be more in nature.

Do you intend to look for that. I am highly interested to learn more and like to encourage you. In the laboratory, fungi are definitely capable to undergo conjugation-mediated gene Transfer. This has been shown for Saccharomyces cerevisiae long ago and, in Addition, several colleagues make use of the Agrobacterium system for introcing DNA into fungi.

There are certainly mechanisms that cope with incoming DNA in a way that iactivates it, sometimes by very intriguing and complicated mechanisms. This is at least true for Mucor-like fungi, that I have favoured for many years, especially Absidia and Parasitella.

Sincerely - Johannes W.

try reading up lateral transfer of genes

@Johannes Wöstemeyer: Thanks for the valuable thoughts; i am actually thinking (particularly) if fungi is able to degrade some bacterial DNA when it is present inside or out the fungi OR spreading from one place to another as because of its hyphal nature....

... without having data Rashid: Definitely yes! Interesting project.

Good luck - Johannes.

To be very precise, fungi do not in anyway help in distribute prokaryotic DNA.

Dear Rashid,

Excellent thought. The Agrobacterium system already shows a few examples. Pl. refer to this article. Good luck

http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.fbr.2011.04.003

@ Oleg & Tapan

thanks for the suggested reading ..!!!

There are experiments showing that the bacterial IncP plasmids transfer to Yeast.  Look  at

Bates S, Cashmore AM, Wilkins BM.

J Bacteriol. 1998 Dec;180(24):6538-43.

Good question and good luck!

Thank you Ariane,

and even before the incP plasmids, where some nice details were revealed, there was ths early described  F-dependent gene transfer from Escherichia to Saccharomyces by Heinemann and Sprague.

Heinemann, J. A., and Sprague, G. F., Jr. (1989). Bacterial conjugative plasmids mobilize DNA transfer between bacteria and yeast. Nature 340, 205–209.

All these systems work nicely in the laboratory, but I have no good ideas, if and how these conjugative systems contributed to evolution.

Good discussion.

Absolutely right Johannes. May we hope that metagenomic data could at some point provide an answer (I mean when sequencing will provide longer sequence stretches or bioinformatics provide tools to better establish  linkage between DNA segments originating from a single cell or species)?

Thanks guys for thoughtful insights in this discussion.

yes, obviously, next few years of this 'genomics era' will give some more information in this area of research.

i am, though, planning some experiments on models of these organisms.