Related papers: Lateral Gene Transfer from the Dead
Large scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…
Phylogenetic networks are increasingly used in evolutionary biology to represent the history of species that have undergone reticulate events such as horizontal gene transfer, hybrid speciation and recombination. One of the most fundamental…
Phylogenetic inference, the task of reconstructing how related sequences evolved from common ancestors, is a central objective in evolutionary genomics. The current state-of-the-art methods exploit probabilistic models of sequence evolution…
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…
We introduce a Markov model for the evolution of a gene family along a phylogeny. The model includes parameters for the rates of horizontal gene transfer, gene duplication, and gene loss, in addition to branch lengths in the phylogeny. The…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
Phylogenetic trees represent the evolutionary relationships between extant lineages, where extinct or non-sampled lineages are omitted. Extending the work of Stadler and collaborators, this paper focuses on the branch lengths in…
The theory of evolution states that the diversity of species can be explained by descent with modification. Therefore, all living beings are related through a common ancestor. This evolutionary process must have left traces in our molecular…
Phylogenetic networks generalise phylogenetic trees and allow for the accurate representation of the evolutionary history of a set of present-day species whose past includes reticulate events such as hybridisation and lateral gene transfer.…
In evolutionary studies it is common to use phylogenetic trees to represent the evolutionary history of a set of species. However, in case the transfer of genes or other genetic information between the species or their ancestors has…
The number of extant individuals within a lineage, as exemplified by counts of species numbers across genera in a higher taxonomic category, is known to be a highly skewed distribution. Because the sublineages (such as genera in a clade)…
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or…
Hybrid evolution and horizontal gene transfer (HGT) are processes where evolutionary relationships may more accurately be described by a reticulated network than by a tree. In such a network, there will often be several paths between any…
Orthology and paralogy relations are often inferred by methods based on gene similarity, which usually yield a graph depicting the relationships between gene pairs. Such relation graphs are known to frequently contain errors, as they cannot…
Evolutionary scenarios describing the evolution of a family of genes within a collection of species comprise the mapping of the vertices of a gene tree $T$ to vertices and edges of a species tree $S$. The relative timing of the last common…
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…
Phylogenetic networks describe the evolution of a set of taxa for which reticulate events have occurred at some point in their evolutionary history. Of particular interest is when the evolutionary history between a set of just three taxa…
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…
Phylogenetic methods have long been used in biology, and more recently have been extended to other fields - for example, linguistics and technology - to study evolutionary histories. Galaxies also have an evolutionary history, and fall…
The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees based on viral genetic sequence data sequentially sampled from an epidemic provides estimates of the past transmission dynamics, by fitting epidemiological models to these trees. To our knowledge,…