Before we understood that DNA was the genetic code, scientists knew that bacteria transferred it between cells. In 1928, 25 years before the structure of DNA was solved, British bacteriologist ...

This article was originally published with the title “ The Recognition of DNA in Bacteria ” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 222 No. 1 (January 1970), p. 88 doi:10.1038 ...

“Wild stuff does happen.” The trillions of bacteria in our bodies regularly exchange DNA with each other, but the idea that their genes could end up in human DNA has been very controversial. In 2001, ...

In the 1960s, Werner Arber observed a dramatic change in the bacteriophage DNA after it invaded these resistant strains of bacteria: It was degraded and cut into pieces. In an attempt to explain ...

Genome sequencing reveals that such horizontal transfer of DNA has been profoundly important in the history of life, and among bacteria it’s especially common, with particular implications for ...

Bacteriophages occasionally remove a portion of their host cells' bacterial DNA during the infection process and then transfer this DNA into the genome of new host cells. This process is known as ...