Selfish Behavior in Restriction and Recombination

摘要

It has been widely believed that the evolution and maintenance of type n restriction modification systems has been driven by the cell's necessity to protect itself against infection by foreign DNA (the cellular defense hypothesis). I would like to present experimental evidence and theoretical arguments for an alternative hypothesis (the selfish gene hypothesis) that the evolution of at least some rm gene pairs is driven by their "selfishness" in the genetic and evolutionary sense of the term (Kobayashi 1996).