Patrick Keeling is a professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on microbial diversity and evolution. His lab studies the tree of eukaryotes, protist diversity, and the evolution of photosynthesis, symbiosis, and parasitism.
 
How Eating Changed Our Genes: The Impact of Phagocytosis and Endosymbiosis on Nuclear Genomes It is generally accepted that when eukaryotes evolved the ability to eat other cells (phagocytosis) and sometimes even maintain them in the cytoplasm for long periods of time (endosymbiosis), that this opened the door to a potentially massive influx of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) from these foreign cells to the nuclear genome. However genomic data suggest nuclear genomes do not actually acquire many genes from either food or endosymbionts. Here we will explore how the origin of eukaryotes may have changed the kinds of genes that selection works on most effectively, and how this change impacted both HGT and endosymbiotic organelle evolution.


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