Deciphering the role of insertion elements in community adaptation to anthropogenic environmental changes. KU Leuven
Horizontal gene transfer plays an essential role in the adaptation of microbial communities to anthropogenic environmental changes. Typical examples are adaptations that confer antibiotic resistance, metal resistance and catabolism of xenobiotic organic pollutants. Among the vehicles that govern HGT are conjugative elements and insertion sequence (IS) elements. Conjugative elements such as plasmids transfer the adaptive gene functions between ...