Detecting Highways of Horizontal Gene Transfer

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 ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: RECOMB
• Authors: Mukul S. Bansal, J. Peter Gogarten, Ron Shamir
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Gene, Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quartets, RECOMB 2010