Microbial Stowaways: Inimitable Survivors or Hopeless Pioneers?

摘要

The resiliency of prokaryotic life has provided colonization across the globe and in the recesses of Earth's most extreme environments. Horizontal gene transfer provides access to a global bank of genetic resources that creates diversity and allows real-time adaptive potential to the clonal prokaryotic world. We assess the likelihood that this Earth-based strategy could provide survival and adaptive potential, in the case of microbial stowaways off Earth.