The Evolution of the Vertebrates Eye

The evolution of the vertebrate eye has been quite intriguing and mysterious with a lot of gaps in knowledge yet to be fitted. What led you to look to bacterial genes as the possible evolutionary origin of IRBP? Yeah, this is an interesting story of how this project started. So we were broadly interested in discovering instances of bacterial genes that have been acquired by diverse animal genomes over millions of years of evolution. And since these events are quite rare and serendipitous, we developed some computational methods to identify genes acquired by GT in animals.