Related papers: Units of genetic transfer in prokaryotes
The widespread presence of antibiotic resistance and virulence among Staphylococcus isolates has been attributed to lateral genetic transfer (LGT) between different strains or species. However, there has been very little study of the extent…
The complex pattern of presence and absence of many genes across different species provides tantalising clues as to how genes evolved through the processes of gene genesis, gene loss and lateral gene transfer (LGT). The extent of LGT,…
Genomes evolve as modules. In prokaryotes (and some eukaryotes), genetic material can be transferred between species and integrated into the genome via homologous or illegitimate recombination. There is little reason to imagine that the…
Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is a common mechanism of non-vertical evolution where genetic material is transferred between two more or less distantly related organisms. It is particularly common in bacteria where it contributes to adaptive…
In phylogenetic studies, the evolution of molecular sequences is assumed to have taken place along the phylogeny traced by the ancestors of extant species. In the presence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), however, this may not be the case,…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important factor in bacterial evolution that can act across species boundaries. Yet, we know little about rate and genomic targets of cross-lineage gene transfer, and about its effects on the recipient…
Although the role of lateral gene transfer is well recognized in the evolution of bacteria, it is generally assumed that it has had less influence among eukaryotes. To explore this hypothesis we compare the dynamics of genome evolution in…
Several implicit methods to infer Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) focus on pairs of genes that have diverged only after the divergence of the two species in which the genes reside. This situation defines the edge set of a graph, the…
The genome of bacterial species is much more flexible than that of eukaryotes. Moreover, the distributed genome hypothesis for bacteria states that the total number of genes present in a bacterial population is greater than the genome of…
A major problem for inferring species trees from gene trees is that evolutionary processes can sometimes favour gene tree topologies that conflict with an underlying species tree. In the case of incomplete lineage sorting, this phenomenon…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important contributor to evolution. According to Walter M.\ Fitch, two genes are xenologs if they are separated by at least one HGT. More formally, the directed Fitch graph has a set of genes is its vertices,…
In a short article submitted to ArXiv [1], Maddamsetti et al. argue that the variation in the neutral mutation rate among genes in Escherichia coli that we recently reported [2] might be explained by horizontal gene transfer (HGT). To…
The bioinformatical methods to detect lateral gene transfer events are mainly based on functional coding DNA characteristics. In this paper, we propose the use of DNA traits not depending on protein coding requirements. We introduce several…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
The current picture of bacterial evolution is based largely on studies of 16S rRNA. However, this is just one gene. It is known that horizontal gene transfer can occur between bacterial species, although the frequency and implications of…
Martincorena et al. estimated synonymous diversity ({\theta}s = 2N{\mu}) across 2,930 orthologous gene alignments from 34 Escherichia coli genomes, and found substantial variation among genes in the density of synonymous polymorphisms. They…
Evolutionary events such as incomplete lineage sorting and lateral gene transfer constitute major problems for inferring species trees from gene trees, as they can sometimes lead to gene trees which conflict with the underlying species…
Given a set of species whose evolution is represented by a species tree, a gene family is a group of genes having evolved from a single ancestral gene. A gene family evolves along the branches of a species tree through various mechanisms,…
Adaptation of bacteria occurs predominantly via horizontal gene transfer (HGT). While it is widely recognized that horizontal acquisitions frequently encompass multiple genes, it is unclear what the size distribution of successfully…