In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is central to microbial activities that influence our health and the environment. It is also clear that the exploitation of HGT holds great promise as an instrument for their improvement.
As HGT is a process that impacts on every aspect of microbiology, with far-reaching implications for human well-being and the environment, a complete understanding of the mechanisms and factors that control this phenomenon will require the contributions and perspectives of quite disparate scientific disciplines. Constructive collaborations of this nature are always challenging, but they also provide the promise of powerful synergistic opportunities that will need to be exploited. The goals of this Focus issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology are to assess our current knowledge of HGT from an ecological, evolutionary and molecular perspective and to build towards a holistic picture of the process and its effect on extant microbial communities.
