http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/456/comments The latest comments on the article 'Horizontal gene transfer and nucleotide compositional anomaly in large DNA viruses' 2008-02-25T00:00:00Z This is an RSS newsfeed from BioMed Central It is intended to be used with an RSS reader. For more information about RSS newsfeeds from BioMed Central, visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/rss/ http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/456/comments#294564 <p>The pioneering studies of Akiyoshi Wada and colleagues in Japan have shown unequivocally that, while an organism's overall base composition (GC%) tends to be species-specific, the base compositions of individual genes in that organism are widely distributed around the average for its species (reviewed in Forsdyke, 2004, J. Biol. Sys. 12, 261-271). This can be explained in terms of the genetic physiology of the organism without invoking horizontal gene transfer. The delightful paper of Monier and colleagues gives welcome support to this view. They should note, however, that some of the viral genomes they have studied contain low complexity sequences (e.g. the EBNA1 gene of Epstein-Barr Virus). For more, please see my textbook "Evolutionary Bioinformatics" (Springer, New York, 2006). </p> Donald Forsdyke 2008-02-25T00:00:00Z