One of my friends from U of I sent me an interesting discussion of a recent paper with a potentially fatal error…..Note the article’s editor…hehe. Anyway, the paper talks about a horizontally transferred gene from the human genome to the genome of the intracellular pathogen, Neisseria gonorrhoeae (http://mbio.asm.org/content/2/1/e00005-11.full).

The following blog has an interesting description of a more plausible reason for the published finding:

http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2011/02/human-dna-in-bacterial-genomes-yes-no-maybe/

Reminds me of the story about Shewanella and Burkholderia being the clearly dominating organisms in one of the Sargasso Sea metagenomes…(http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v3/n6/pdf/nrmicro1158.pdf)