[Identification of the horizontal gene transfer based on phylogenetic data]

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary biology
• Genomics
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a significant evolutionary mechanism, particularly in prokaryotes.
• Identifying HGT events is crucial for understanding genome evolution and microbial adaptation.
• Existing methods for HGT detection can be computationally intensive or limited in scope.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel computational procedure for detecting genes with horizontal transfer events.
• To quantify the topological differences between gene and species phylogenetic trees.
• To identify candidate genes with a high likelihood of having undergone horizontal transfer.

Main Methods:

• Developed a procedure analyzing topological differences between gene (protein group) and species phylogenetic trees.
• Introduced numerical metrics to measure tree discrepancy.
• Applied the method to analyze 40 prokaryotic genomes across 132 orthologous gene classes.

Main Results:

• Successfully applied the novel procedure to a dataset of 40 prokaryotic genomes.
• Generated a list of candidate genes exhibiting significant phylogenetic incongruence.
• The results suggest a high probability of horizontal transfer for the identified candidate genes.

Conclusions:

• The proposed method offers an effective approach for identifying genes with horizontal transfer histories.
• This technique aids in understanding the role of HGT in prokaryotic evolution.
• The identified candidate genes warrant further investigation for their evolutionary significance.