Identical sequences found in distant genomes reveal frequent horizontal transfer across the bacterial domain

Michael Sheinman*, Ksenia Arkhipova, Peter F. Arndt, Bas E. Dutilh, Rutger Hermsen, Florian Massip

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an essential force in microbial evolution. Despite detailed studies on a variety of systems, a global picture of HGT in the microbial world is still missing. Here, we exploit that HGT creates long identical DNA sequences in the genomes of distant species, which can be found efficiently using alignment-free methods. Our pairwise analysis of 93,481 bacterial genomes identified 138,273 HGT events. We developed a model to explain their statistical properties as well as estimate the transfer rate between pairs of taxa. This reveals that long-distance HGT is frequent: our results indicate that HGT between species from different phyla has occurred in at least 8% of the species. Finally, our results confirm that the function of sequences strongly impacts their transfer rate, which varies by more than three orders of magnitude between different functional categories. Overall, we provide a comprehensive view of HGT, illuminating a fundamental process driving bacterial evolution.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere62719
Number of pages25
JournaleLife
Volume10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Jun 2021

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