How common is horizontal gene transfer between plant species?

Measure how often genes move sideways between plant species, and whether these transfers have shaped plant evolution and adaptation.

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	1	+# How common is horizontal gene transfer between plant species?
	2	+
	3	+Genes usually pass from parent to offspring, but genome sequencing keeps finding plant genes that arrived sideways from other species. How often this happens, and whether it has shaped plant evolution, is still debated.
	4	+
	5	+## Question
	6	+
	7	+How extensive is horizontal (lateral) gene transfer across plant species, and is it an important stimulus for evolution? This covers transfers between plant lineages, the mechanisms that make them possible, and their functional and adaptive consequences.
	8	+
	9	+## Background
	10	+
	11	+The question is in the category "Molecular Approaches to Fundamental Plant Biology" of the 2023 list of 100 important questions facing plant science, chosen by four regional panels from 616 submitted questions [1]. If transfers are frequent and functional, they change how plant genomes and family trees should be read, and they offer a route to new traits that bypasses the limits of vertical inheritance [2].
	12	+
	13	+## What is known
	14	+
	15	+- Ferns acquired neochrome, a chimeric photoreceptor that may have helped them diversify in low light, from hornworts; the fern and hornwort genes diverged about 179 million years ago, long after the two lineages split [3].
	16	+- A chromosome-level genome of the grass Alloteropsis semialata, screened against 146 other grasses, revealed 59 laterally acquired genes in fragments up to 170 kb from at least nine donor species, most of them expressed and adding functions to the recipient [2].
	17	+- A scan of 17 grass species found transferred genes in 13; rhizomatous species received more, and transfers were more frequent between close relatives, although they occurred across almost the whole family [4].
	18	+- Scans of recently sequenced genomes across the green lineage have revealed hundreds of transfers, from microbes to plants and between plants, and sequence-based and phylogenomic tests now exist to check whether a putative transfer is robust [5].
	19	+
	20	+## What would count as progress
	21	+
	22	+No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:
	23	+
	24	+- Systematic scans of high-quality genomes across plant families with a shared, stringent pipeline that rules out contamination and other explanations, released with code so that results can be reproduced.
	25	+- Functional tests of what transferred genes do in the recipient, through expression studies, knockouts and fitness measurements.
	26	+- Studies that identify the routes of transfer (for example parasitism, root contact or grafting) and test them experimentally.
	27	+
	28	+## References
	29	+
	30	+1. Armstrong, E. M. et al. (2023). [One hundred important questions facing plant science: an international perspective](https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.18771). New Phytologist 238(2), 470–481.
	31	+2. Dunning, L. T. et al. (2019). [Lateral transfers of large DNA fragments spread functional genes among grasses](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810031116). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(10), 4416–4425.
	32	+3. Li, F.-W. et al. (2014). [Horizontal transfer of an adaptive chimeric photoreceptor from bryophytes to ferns](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319929111). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(18), 6672–6677.
	33	+4. Hibdige, S. G. S. et al. (2021). [Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses](https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17328). New Phytologist 230(6), 2474–2486.
	34	+5. Mariault, L. et al. (2025). [Mechanisms, detection, and impact of horizontal gene transfer in plant functional evolution](https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koaf195). The Plant Cell 37(9), koaf195.
	35	+
	36	+## Source
	37	+
	38	+Imported from [One hundred important questions facing plant science, question 95](https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.18771), curated by Armstrong et al. Listed as open in the source (2023) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.