Abstract
In a horizontal gene transfer (HGT) event a gene is transferred between two species that do not share an ancestor-descendant relationship. Typically, no more than a few genes are horizontally transferred between any two species. However, several studies identified pairs of species between which many different genes were horizontally transferred. Such a pair is said to be linked by a highway of gene sharing. We present a method for inferring such highways. Our method is based on the fact that the evolutionary histories of horizontally transferred genes disagree with the corresponding species phylogeny. Specifically, given a set of gene trees and a trusted rooted species tree, each gene tree is first decomposed into its constituent quartet trees and the quartets that are inconsistent with the species tree are identified. Our method finds a pair of species such that a highway between them explains the largest (normalized) fraction of inconsistent quartets. For a problem on n species, our method requires O(n 4) time, which is optimal with respect to the quartets input size. An application of our method to a dataset of 1128 genes from 11 cyanobacterial species, as well as to simulated datasets, illustrates the efficacy of our method.
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Bansal, M.S., Gogarten, J.P., Shamir, R. (2010). Detecting Highways of Horizontal Gene Transfer. In: Tannier, E. (eds) Comparative Genomics. RECOMB-CG 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6398. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16181-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16181-0_10
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