Detecting Highways of Horizontal Gene Transfer
Author(s)
Bansal, Mukul S.; Banay, Guy; Gogarten, J. Peter; Shamir, Ron
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In a horizontal gene transfer (HGT) event, a gene is transferred between two species that do not have 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 n species and m input quartet trees, we give an efficient O(m + n2)-time algorithm for detecting highways, which is optimal with respect to the quartets input size. An application of our method to a dataset of 1128 genes from 11 cyanobacterial species, as well as to simulated datasets, illustrates the efficacy of our method.
Date issued
2011-09Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryJournal
Journal of Computational Biology
Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Citation
Bansal, Mukul S., Guy Banay, J. Peter Gogarten, and Ron Shamir. "Detecting Highways of Horizontal Gene Transfer." Journal of Computational Biology. September 2011, 18(9): 1087-1114. ©2011 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Version: Final published version
ISSN
1066-5277
1066-5277