Related papers: Gene cluster analysis method reliably identifies h…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Motivation: Gene blocks are genes co-located on the chromosome. In many cases, genes blocks are conserved between bacterial species, sometimes as operons, when genes are co-transcribed. The conservation is rarely absolute: gene loss, gain,…
In this article we are describing a new algorithm for detecting and validating partial horizontal gene transfers (HGT). The presented algorithm is based on a sliding window procedure which analyzes fragments of the given multiple sequence…
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 events partition a gene tree $T$ and thus, its leaf set into subsets of genes whose evolutionary history is described by speciation and duplication events alone. Indirect phylogenetic methods can be used to infer…
We describe a stochastic birth-and-death model of evolution of horizontally transferred genes in microbial populations. The model is a generalization of the stochastic model described by Berg and Kurland and includes five parameters: the…
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…
The ~4-Mbp basic genome shared by 32 independent isolates of E. coli representing considerable population diversity has been approximated by whole-genome multiple-alignment and computational filtering designed to remove mobile elements and…
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…
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…
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 inference approaches are usually based on gene sequences: parametric methods search for patterns that deviate from a particular genomic signature, while phylogenetic methods use sequences to reconstruct the gene and…
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 phenomenon of gene conservation is an interesting evolutionary problem related to speciation and adaptation. Conserved genes are acted upon in evolution in a way that preserves their function despite other structural and functional…
Horizontal gene Transfer (HT) denotes the transmission of genetic material between two living organisms, while the vertical transmission refers to a DNA transfer from parents to their offspring. Consistent experimental evidence report that…
An approximation to the ~4 Mbp basic genome shared by 32 strains of E. coli representing six evolutionary groups has been derived and analyzed computationally. A multiple-alignment of the 32 complete genome sequences was filtered to remove…
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…