The power of phylogenetic approaches to detect horizontally transferred genes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Horizontal gene transfer plays an important role in evolution because it sometimes allows recipient lineages to adapt to new ecological niches. High genes transfer frequencies were inferred for prokaryotic and early eukaryotic evolution. Does horizontal gene transfer also impact phylogenetic reconstruction of the evolutionary history of genomes and organisms? The answer to this question depends at least in part on the actual gene transfer frequencies and on the ability to weed out transferred genes from further analyses. Are the detected transfers mainly false positives, or are they the tip of an iceberg of many transfer events most of which go undetected by current methods?

Results

Phylogenetic detection methods appear to be the method of choice to infer gene tra

SUBMITTER: Poptsova MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1847511 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature