ArticleEcology and evolution2025
Reassessing Interkingdom Horizontal Gene Transfer Suggests Limited Influence on Plant Genomes.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structural Variation and Its Roles in Plant Genomes.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- What impact do new homologs have on detecting interdomain horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes? A reassessment of Katz (2015).Biology open · 2026Article
- Regulatory features determine the evolutionary fate of laterally acquired genes in plants.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- A machine learning framework for interpreting phylogenetic tree patterns in interkingdom horizontal gene transfer.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Interkingdom horizontal gene transfer in plants: a perspective on methodological limitations and evolutionary alternatives.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Reassessing Interkingdom Horizontal Gene Transfer Suggests Limited Influence on Plant Genomes.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a well-established mechanism of genetic innovation in bacteria, but its impact on eukaryotes-and particularly on plants-remains debated. In recent years, numerous studies have reported hundreds of putative nuclear genes in plants with origins in other kingdoms, often interpreted as adaptive acquisitions. Most of these claims rely on phylogenetic reconstructions, which are highly sensitive to taxon sampling and can shift as new homologs are identified. To reassess this evidence, we systematically collected published reports of interkingdom HGT in plants and reconstructed phylogenetic trees using up-to-date genomic data from public databases. Candidate topologies were first evaluated with an automated tool and then manually curated. Our reanalysis shows that only 29.3% of previously reported cases remain consistent with an interkingdom HGT scenario. Many candidates are more parsimoniously explained by alternative processes such as gene loss or incomplete taxon sampling. These findings highlight the dynamic nature of phylogenetic inference and caution against treating HGT as the default explanation for anomalous phylogenies in plant genomes.
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Registered trials
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