“…Studies with bacterial species (1,22,28,29,39,46,51,(57)(58)(59), Saccharomyces cerevisiae (4,7,12,13,20,24,30,32,33,35,36,40,43,44), and higher eukaryotes (14,15,52,56) have uniformly found that sequence divergence acts as a potent barrier to recombination. As first shown in conjugational crosses between Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium (39), much of the recombination barrier associated with sequence divergence in prokaryotes derives from the action of the MMR machinery (1,16,22,28,29,51,57).…”