Automated inference Pipeline For Assessment of Lateral Gener Transfer Among Microbial Genomes

摘要

It has long been accepted that genes are transmitted from parent to offspring along genealogical lineages through time. A few exceptions to this general theme have been recognised, including the endosymbiotic origin of organelles in eukaryotes, and the spread of antibiotic resistance between bacterial populations. Comparative analyses of completely sequenced genomes of prokaryotes have, however, revealed an unexpectedly large number of instances in which the distribution, compositional properties or inferred phylogenies of genes cannot readily be explained by classical vertical (parent-to-offspring) gene transmission. Lateral gene transfer (LGT), in which genes are transmitted not within, but across, organismal lineages, has increasingly become the default explanation for the origin of these anomalies.