Identifiability Issues in Phylogeny-Based Detection of Horizontal Gene Transfer

Prokaryotic organisms share genetic material across species boundaries by means of a process known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Detecting this process bears great significance on understanding prokaryotic genome diversification and unraveling their complexities. Phylogeny-based detection of HGT is one of the most commonly used approaches for this task, and is based on the fundamental fact that HGT may cause gene trees to disagree with one another, as well as with the species phylogeny. Hence, methods that adopt this approach compare gene and species trees, and infer a set of HGT events to reconcile the differences among these trees. In this paper, we address some of the identifiability issues that face phylogeny-based detection of HGT. In particular, we show the effect of inaccuracies in the reconstructed (species and gene) trees on inferring the correct number of HGT events. Further, we show that a large number of maximally parsimonious HGT scenarios may exist. These results ind...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: RECOMB
• Authors: Cuong Than, Derek A. Ruths, Hideki Innan, Luay Nakhleh
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Horizontal Gene Transfer, Prokaryotic Genome Diversification, RECOMB 2006, Share Genetic Material