Feature

Pass the Genes, Please

Gene swapping muddles the history of microbes

By John Travis

- More than 2 years ago

Thanks to marriage and birth records, human genealogy is relatively simple. Some people, taking for granted that infidelity hasn’t blemished the family history, can trace their genes back hundreds or thousands of years.

Scientists suspect that the bacterium Thermotoga maritima received a surprisingly large number of its genes from distantly related microbes known as archaea.