Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 31, 2026

Using Single-Worm Data to Quantify Heterogeneity in Caenorhabditis elegans-Bacterial Interactions
Published on: July 22, 2022
Horizontal transmission rapidly erodes disequilibria between organelle and symbiont genomes
Yaniv Brandvain1, Charles Goodnight, Michael J Wade
1Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA. ybrandvain@gmail.com
Abstract:
We investigate the generation and decay of interspecific disequilibrium (ID) between organelle and symbiont genomes as a function of the rate of horizontal transmission. We show that rare horizontal transmission greatly diminishes the covariance between organelle and symbiont genomes. This result has two important implications. First, a low level of ID does not indicate low levels of vertical transmission. Second, even with low levels of horizontal transmission, the additive effects of host and symbiont loci will determine the response to selection, while epistatic effects will not be selectable.
Related Concept Videos
Evolution of Microbial Genome
Export of Mitochondrial and Chloroplast Genes
Evolutionary Processes in Microbes
Microbial Interactions: Parasitism
Diversity of Protists I
Colonisation of Pathogens

