Identification of genes with fast-evolving regions in microbial genomes.

ABSTRACT: Complete sequences of multiple strains of the same microbial species provide an invaluable source for studying the evolutionary dynamics between orthologous genes over a relatively short time scale. Usually the intensity of the selection pressure is inferred from a comparison between the nonsynonymous substitution rate and the synonymous substitution rate. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for detecting genes with one or more fast-evolving regions from pairwise comparisons of orthologous genes. Our method looks for regions with overrepresented nonsynonymous mutations along the alignment, and requires a higher nonsynonymous evolution rate in those regions than the neutral evolution rate. It identifies gene targets under intensive selection pressure that are not detected from t

SUBMITTER: Zheng Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC535660 | biostudies-literature | 2004

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature