Abstract
Many parasites and various other pathogens leave no physical fossil record. Nevertheless, they might leave “genomic fossils” in their host organisms through horizontal transfer of genetic material, especially transposable elements (TEs) which are selfish genetic elements capable of moving or copying from one genomic location to another. Hundreds of convincing cases of horizontal transposon transfer (HTT) have been demonstrated for various animals and plants. While the exact vectors for TE movement between cells remain unknown, the proximity of host and parasite cells seems to be a common avenue for HTT. The known cases of host-parasite HTT have revealed evidence for ancient and often unforeseen parasitic interactions which can be dated through the sequence divergence of transferred TEs. The ongoing sequencing of thousands of eukaryotic genomes promises to drastically improve the resolution of the molecular fossil record of host-parasite interactions.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Jesper Boman, Anne-Marie Dion-Côté, and Valentina Peona for helpful discussions and Sonja Dunemann for valuable comments on the manuscript. I further thank Kenneth De Baets and Tim Littlewood for reviewing the manuscript. Ongoing work on this topic is supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council (2017-01597).
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Suh, A. (2021). Horizontal Transfer of Transposons as Genomic Fossils of Host-Parasite Interactions. In: De Baets, K., Huntley, J.W. (eds) The Evolution and Fossil Record of Parasitism. Topics in Geobiology, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52233-9_14
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