Bacteria are prokaryotic cells with haploid DNA, no introns, and a single circular DNA molecule. They also possess the ability to replicate many times in one minute and this makes it easy to culture them in the laboratory.
Bacteria have three ways of genetic exchange:
- Plasmid-mediated conjugation
- Phage mediated transduction
- DNA mediated transformation
An important point to remember is that genetic exchange is unidirectional; this means that genetic information flows from donor to recipient and not the other way round