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Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology

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Abstract

The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living cells communicate genetically through transferred genes, as well as the ways in which they can reorganize their genomes in response to environmental pressure. We discuss how genome evolution can be thought of as related to the physical phenomenon of annealing, and describe the sense in which genomes can be said to exhibit an analogue of information entropy. As a direct application of these ideas, we analyze the variation with ocean depth of transposons in marine microbial genomes, predicting trends that are consistent with recent observations using metagenomic surveys.

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  1. Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Nicholas Chia

  2. Loomis Laboratory of Physics, Department of Physics and Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Nigel Goldenfeld

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  1. Nicholas Chia
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Chia, N., Goldenfeld, N. Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology. J Stat Phys 142, 1287–1301 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-010-0112-8

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