Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast. Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett.

Biologists have understood the broad contours of the rules of inheritance for more than a century, that genes are passed down from

parent to child within species. But in more recent years, they've also become aware

of genes that go rogue and hop laterally between species. That's next.

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Genes that hop laterally between species range from frog genes in Madagascar that

originally came from snakes to antifreeze genes found in cold

water fish like herring that transferred to smelts. The mechanism facilitating this gene transfer has

been unclear, though scientists suspected viruses played a role. In new research published in science,

researchers have identified a unique class of genetic elements

as the agents responsible for shuttling certain genes between multiple species of simple invertebrates

called roundworms. A jump from one worm to another may not sound like much, but the worms in question diverged many millions of years

ago. This made them as different at the molecular level as fish and humans. The genetic elements are

called Mavericks. Here's geneticist Alejandro Borga of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Mavericks as a cold class are pretty ancient. Mavericks are in almost all animals. They're not in

plants, but they're in most animal branches. They've been detected in both invertebrates and vertebrates,

and they display many features found in

...