<P> As of 2014 about 80 species of bacteria were known to be capable of transformation, about evenly divided between Gram - positive and Gram - negative bacteria; the number might be an overestimate since several of the reports are supported by single papers . </P> <P> "Transformation" may also be used to describe the insertion of new genetic material into nonbacterial cells, including animal and plant cells; however, because "transformation" has a special meaning in relation to animal cells, indicating progression to a cancerous state, the process is usually called "transfection". </P> <P> Transformation in bacteria was first demonstrated in 1928 by British bacteriologist Frederick Griffith . Griffith discovered that a strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae could be made virulent after being exposed to heat - killed virulent strains . Griffith hypothesized that some "transforming principle" from the heat - killed strain was responsible for making the harmless strain virulent . In 1944 this "transforming principle" was identified as being genetic by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty . They isolated DNA from a virulent strain of S. pneumoniae and using just this DNA were able to make a harmless strain virulent . They called this uptake and incorporation of DNA by bacteria "transformation" (See Avery - MacLeod - McCarty experiment). The results of Avery et al.'s experiments were at first skeptically received by the scientific community and it was not until the development of genetic markers and the discovery of other methods of genetic transfer (conjugation in 1947 and transduction in 1953) by Joshua Lederberg that Avery's experiments were accepted . </P> <P> It was originally thought that Escherichia coli, a commonly used laboratory organism, was refractory to transformation . However, in 1970, Morton Mandel and Akiko Higa showed that E. coli may be induced to take up DNA from bacteriophage λ without the use of helper phage after treatment with calcium chloride solution . Two years later in 1972, Stanley Norman Cohen, Annie Chang and Leslie Hsu showed that CaCl 2 treatment is also effective for transformation of plasmid DNA . The method of transformation by Mandel and Higa was later improved upon by Douglas Hanahan . The discovery of artificially induced competence in E. coli created an efficient and convenient procedure for transforming bacteria which allows for simpler molecular cloning methods in biotechnology and research, and it is now a routinely used laboratory procedure . </P>

Who discovered that dna can be transferred from one bacterium to another