Butterfly effect in HGT

Although many people know the butterfly effect, the wave of butterfly wing at one corner of earth can cause tsunami in another place, many scientific researchers forget this story in their actual study unconsciously. Afraid of inexorable critique, only events with high possibility were concerned and events with low possibility and not easily detectable were neglected or were considered to be ignorable 'background'. Take recent research in genetic transformation for example. Admittedly, transformation with homologous DNA was much easier than that with heterologous DNA. As one can get more obvious phenotype in homologous transformation and the evidence with large magnitude difference in their data presented make the arguer standing on a better ground for defencing their theory. However, nature is not just arguing for theory. Like fatal diseases appear out of our conciousless but develop irreversible, many events take place unappreciable but with immense impact in the later phase. Although we get much information about the later events of tranfsormation, our recent transformation mechanism study is just confined to the tsunami and the butterfly was almost completely forgotten.

From the evolution perspective, homologous tranformation makes significant contribution to a special species, but make little impact to the whole ecosystem. The genetic communication between the same species is common to all over the eukaryotic and prokaryotic kindom. So, it is not surprise to discover natural transformation among bacteria of the same species with their own chromosomal DNA. However, this can not explain high frequency event of HGT among different bacterial species providing the information from comparing known genomes. Neitheir conjugation can explain this because gene communication in this form occurs only in conjugative plasmid, another special form of DNA with non-comprehensive impact. Butterfly event might edify us to find the right way to this important issue. The first step of explaning high HGT among different species is to prove that heterogenous DNA is able to be taken up and sucessfully transformed. For self-protecting, the frequency of heterogenous DNA transformation (butterfly wave) should be considerably low but the accumulation impact is high enough to change the whole bacterial world regarding information of genome comparing among species (tsunami).

The significance of the low frequency of heterogenous DNA transformation should not be negligible in our study since this might be the main channel through which different species communicate with one other. This communication would cause a long inevaluable impetus to the whole ecosystem in the background of the whole life history.