Among such simpler microbial creatures, they wrote, horizontal gene transfer is far more important, in quantity and consequences, than imagined previously. Its impacts could be understood in four ways. First, new genes received by sideways transfer, from a different lineage or species, may allow a population of microbes (the recipient bug and its offspring) to colonize an entirely new ecological niche. Second, it may allow organisms to acquire a new sort of adaptation abruptly, without passing through the dangerous stage of being only half adapted to one situation or another. Third, this
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