have you ever saw someone's hair and thought man I really wish I had that review ever watch a superhero movie and said man I wish I could do that in this video I'm gonna show you how you can as long as you're a bacteria [Music] for as long as there have been jeans there have been different methods to get those jeans moved from one organism to another our focus in this video is going to be horizontal gene transfer but I want to talk about vertical gene transfer for a moment but let me show you an example of vertical gene transfer so vertical gene transfer is how genes are gonna be passed from one organism to another with reproduction so here we have myself and my beautiful wife Liz and we mix and match genes when we create offspring and here we have Oliver my son so that's an example of vertical gene transfer how organisms are able to mix and match genes which allows for adaptation and evolution from generation to generation but bacteria are different because they do that when they reproduce through binary fission but they also can evolve in their lifetime using horizontal gene transfer so let me show you some key examples here of horizontal gene transfer so the three main ones that I think of them will cover a fourth our transformation transduction and conjugation so just step back and imagine for a second or think about for a second what this means they're able to pick up traits during their lifetime which means they're able to evolve during their lifetime and the reason this is so important is because of things they develop resistance factors they're able to pick up genes for new toxins or genes that allow them to digest a new food source or genes most importantly that allow them to resist our antibiotics so I'm going to cover each of these in more detail later this is just an introduction but transformation is when DNA is transferred from one organism to another as naked DNA in solution so this actually means that this bacteria here in the upper left-hand corner is actually going to just bump into DNA imagine if you're swimming in a pool as gross as this might seem swimming in a pool and there was DNA in that pool when you bump into it you could actually take it into your cells and incorporate it into your genome that's exactly what happens so for example let's say that an e coli bacteria is minding its own business swimming in a sea where it lives and it bumps into a gene that allows it to resist an antibiotic or it bumps into a gene that allows it to pick up a toxin now this could very well be where a coli o157 h7 came from where the e.coli bacteria minding its own business picked up a gene for the shigga toxin and now we have this toxin-producing e.coli that causes problems and kills humans so that's transformation in a nutshell transduction is actually going to be transferring genetic material using something of phage so I'll have separate videos where I cover phages they're very important I think that they certainly can cause some problems but I actually think they're more of a solution than the problem so I will cover them in depth but this would be an example of where a phage would actually go into a bacteria and do what it's supposed to do which is to chop up the bacterial DNA making this cell here a factory factory to produce more phages and then when these phages go on to their next cell they're actually going to be carrying some that bacterial DNA with them so I'll cover that all in detail later then we have conjugation so conjugation is going to be how one bacteria uses a a sex pilis or a mating bridge to physically transfer bacteria through something called a plasmid from one cell into another so this allows populations of bacteria to evolve because if I'm a bacteria and I have a trait that's useful I get to keep that trait I get to make a copy of that trait and I get to give it to my neighbors so if you think about a thousand bacteria hiding under a biofilm one of them can have a trait a resistance factor something that gives them a survival advantage they can share that with all their neighbors and all thousand of them can come out of that biofilm having that trait so those are the three main examples of horizontal gene transfer that will be covered transformation naked DNA in solution transduction uses a phage or bacteria phage to transfer DNA from one bacteria to another and conjugation is going to use a sex palace or a mating bridge and it's going to use a plasmid to transfer DNA so there is a fourth type of vertical gene or horizontal gene transfer that's important and worth talking about here and that's called transposons or jumping genes these were first found in maize by a scientist named Barbara McClintock she ended up winning the Nobel Prize in 1983 I believe for figuring out what transposon czar so these are actually genes that can jump from one region of DNA to another so transposon can jump from one part of a chromosome to another it can jump from one chromosome to another but probably most importantly from an antibiotic-resistant standpoint they're able to jump from where they are in the genome into a plasmid where they can then be transferred to another organism so those are your transposons I just want to credit openstax and Rice University for the images here and I hope this has been a great video now you know more so you can be more go change the world [Music]