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Updated: Feb 18, 2026

Detection of Horizontal Gene Transfer Mediated by Natural Conjugative Plasmids in E. coli
Published on: March 24, 2023
HgtSIM: a simulator for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in microbial communities
Weizhi Song1,2, Kerrin Steensen1,3, Torsten Thomas1,4
1Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Abstract:
The development and application of metagenomic approaches have provided an opportunity to study and define horizontal gene transfer (HGT) on the level of microbial communities. However, no current metagenomic data simulation tools offers the option to introduce defined HGT within a microbial community. Here, we present HgtSIM, a pipeline to simulate HGT event among microbial community members with user-defined mutation levels. It was developed for testing and benchmarking pipelines for recovering HGTs from complex microbial datasets. HgtSIM is implemented in Python3 and is freely available at: https://github.com/songweizhi/HgtSIM.
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