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Updated: May 21, 2026

Detection of Horizontal Gene Transfer Mediated by Natural Conjugative Plasmids in E. coli
Published on: March 24, 2023
Detection of horizontal gene transfers from phylogenetic comparisons
Victor Satler Pylro1, Luciano de Souza Vespoli, Gabriela Frois Duarte
1Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Biotecnologia para o Meio Ambiente, Departamento de Microbiologia, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Avenida P.H. Rolfs, s/n, Viçosa, MG, Brazil.
Abstract:
Bacterial phylogenies have become one of the most important challenges for microbial ecology. This field started in the mid-1970s with the aim of using the sequence of the small subunit ribosomal RNA (16S) tool to infer bacterial phylogenies. Phylogenetic hypotheses based on other sequences usually give conflicting topologies that reveal different evolutionary histories, which in some cases may be the result of horizontal gene transfer events. Currently, one of the major goals of molecular biology is to understand the role that horizontal gene transfer plays in species adaptation and evolution. In this work, we compared the phylogenetic tree based on 16S with the tree based on dszC, a gene involved in the cleavage of carbon-sulfur bonds. Bacteria of several genera perform this survival task when living in environments lacking free mineral sulfur. The biochemical pathway of the desulphurization process was extensively studied due to its economic importance, since this step is expensive and indispensable in fuel production. Our results clearly show that horizontal gene transfer events could be detected using common phylogenetic methods with gene sequences obtained from public sequence databases.
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