The impact of long-distance horizontal gene transfer on prokaryotic genome size
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Cordero-2009-The impact of long-d.pdf
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Author(s)
Cordero Sanchez, Otto Xavier
Hogeweg, Paulien
Date Issued
December 2009
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (PNAS)
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Cordero, O. X., and P. Hogeweg. “The impact of long-distance horizontal gene transfer on prokaryotic genome size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106.51 (2009): 21748-21753. Copyright ©2011 by the National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is one of the most dominant forces molding prokaryotic gene repertoires. These repertoires can be as small as ≈200 genes in intracellular organisms or as large as ≈9,000 genes in large, free-living bacteria. In this article we ask what is the impact of HGT from phylogenetically distant sources, relative to the size of the gene repertoire. Using different approaches for HGT detection and focusing on both cumulative and recent evolutionary histories, we find a surprising pattern of nonlinear enrichment of long-distance transfers in large genomes. Moreover, we find a strong positive correlation between the sizes of the donor and recipient genomes. Our results also show that distant horizontal transfers are biased toward those functional groups that are enriched in large genomes, showing that the trends in functional gene content and the impact of distant transfers are interdependent. These results highlight the intimate relationship between environmental and genomic complexity in microbes and suggest that an ecological, as opposed to phylogenetic, signal in gene content gains relative importance in large-genomed bacteria.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907584106
