Tapestry of Life: Lateral Transfers of Heritable Elements

Organizers: Siv Andersson, Jonathan Eisen, Claire Fraser, and Jeffrey Gordon
Co-Chairs: Claire Fraser and Jeffrey Gordon
Beckman Center, Irvine, California
December 12-13, 2005

Final Program and Presentations

Meeting Overview

The Sackler Colloquium The Tapestry of Life: Lateral Transfers of Heritable Elements was held on December 12-13, 2005.  What Darwin saw as a tree of life descending in a linear fashion, is now more accurately seen as a tapestry of life, an anastomosing network, with important lateral transfers of heritable elements among parallel lines of descent. These transfers range in complexity from small insertion sequences, to whole genes, gene islands, and portions of whole genomes which may be combined in symbiogenesis. The colloquium brought together researchers, empirical and theoretical, working at all levels on genomics, comparative genomics, and metagenomics to identify common and differentiating features of lateral gene transfer and to examine their implications for science and for human concerns.