Do different surrogate methods detect lateral genetic transfer events of different relative ages?

Trends Microbiol. 2006 Jan;14(1):4-8. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2005.11.004. Epub 2005 Dec 13.

Abstract

Non-tree-based ("surrogate") methods have been used to identify instances of lateral genetic transfer in microbial genomes but agreement among predictions of different methods can be poor. It has been proposed that this disagreement arises because different surrogate methods are biased towards the detection of certain types of transfer events. This conjecture is supported by a rigorous phylogenetic analysis of 3776 proteins in Escherichia coli K12 MG1655 to map the ages of transfer events relative to one another.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Base Composition
  • Computational Biology
  • Escherichia coli K12 / genetics*
  • Escherichia coli Proteins / genetics
  • Gene Transfer, Horizontal / genetics*
  • Genome, Bacterial / genetics*
  • Markov Chains
  • Phylogeny

Substances

  • Escherichia coli Proteins