Alienness: Rapid Detection of Candidate Horizontal Gene Transfers across the Tree of Life.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Rancurel C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5664098 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Bacterial phylogenies have become one of the most important challenges for microbial ecology. This field started in the mid-1970s with the aim of using the sequence of the small subunit ribosomal RNA (16S) tool to infer bacterial phylogenies. Phylogenetic hypotheses based on other sequences usually give conflicting topologies that reveal different evolutionary histories, which in some cases may be the result of horizontal gene transfer events. Currently, one of the major goals of molecular biology is to understand the role that horizontal gene transfer plays in species adaptation and evolution. In this work, we compared the phylogenetic tree based on 16S with the tree based on dszC, a gene involved in the cleavage of carbon-sulfur bonds. Bacteria of several genera perform this survival task when living in environments lacking free mineral sulfur. The biochemical pathway of the desulphurization process was extensively studied due to its economic importance, since this step is expensive and indispensable in fuel production. Our results clearly show that horizontal gene transfer events could be detected using common phylogenetic methods with gene sequences obtained from public sequence databases.
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Project description:Biodiversity has always been predominantly microbial, and the scarcity of fossils from bacteria, archaea and microbial eukaryotes has prevented a comprehensive dating of the tree of life. Here, we show that patterns of lateral gene transfer deduced from an analysis of modern genomes encode a novel and abundant source of information about the temporal coexistence of lineages throughout the history of life. We use state-of-the-art species tree-aware phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the history of thousands of gene families and demonstrate that dates implied by gene transfers are consistent with estimates from relaxed molecular clocks in Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. We present the order of speciations according to lateral gene transfer data calibrated to geological time for three datasets comprising 40 genomes for Cyanobacteria, 60 genomes for Archaea and 60 genomes for Fungi. An inspection of discrepancies between transfers and clocks and a comparison with mammalian fossils show that gene transfer in microbes is potentially as informative for dating the tree of life as the geological record in macroorganisms.
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Project description:The evolutionary history of biological pathways is of general interest, especially in this post-genomic era, because it may provide clues for understanding how complex systems encoded on genomes have been organized. To explain how pathways can evolve de novo, some noteworthy models have been proposed. However, direct reconstruction of pathway evolutionary history both on a genomic scale and at the depth of the tree of life has suffered from artificial effects in estimating the gene content of ancestral species. Recently, we developed an algorithm that effectively reconstructs gene-content evolution without these artificial effects, and we applied it to this problem. The carefully reconstructed history, which was based on the metabolic pathways of 160 prokaryotic species, confirmed that pathways have grown beyond the random acquisition of individual genes. Pathway acquisition took place quickly, probably eliminating the difficulty in holding genes during the course of the pathway evolution. This rapid evolution was due to massive horizontal gene transfers as gene groups, some of which were possibly operon transfers, which would convey existing pathways but not be able to generate novel pathways. To this end, we analyzed how these pathways originally appeared and found that the original acquisition of pathways occurred more contemporaneously than expected across different phylogenetic clades. As a possible model to explain this observation, we propose that novel pathway evolution may be facilitated by bidirectional horizontal gene transfers in prokaryotic communities. Such a model would complement existing pathway evolution models.
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Project description:Microsporidia are obligate intracellular parasites whose genomes have been shaped by an extreme lifestyle. Specifically, their obligate intracellular parasitism has resulted in the loss of many genes and biochemical pathways, but these reductive processes have been often offset by the acquisition of several genes by means of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Until recently, these HGTs were all found to have derived from prokaryotic donors, but a recent study suggests that some species took advantage of this mechanism to acquire one gene from an animal, which they maintained in their genome for metabolic purposes. The gene encodes for a purine nucleoside phosphorylase, and shows a strong phylogenetic signal of arthropod origin. Here, we briefly review our current knowledge of HGTs discovered across microsporidian genomes and discuss the implications of the most recent findings in this research area for understanding the origin and evolution of this highly adapted group of intracellular parasites. A novel gene potentially transferred by means of HGT to one microsporidia is also reported.
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Project description:Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has appeared to be of importance for prokaryotic species evolution. As a consequence numerous parametric methods, using only the information embedded in the genomes, have been designed to detect HGTs. Numerous reports of incongruencies in results of the different methods applied to the same genomes were published. The use of artificial genomes in which all HGT parameters are controlled allows testing different methods in the same conditions. The results of this benchmark concerning 16 representative parametric methods showed a great variety of efficiencies. Some methods work very poorly whatever the type of HGTs and some depend on the conditions or on the metrics used. The best methods in terms of total errors were those using tetranucleotides as criterion for the window methods or those using codon usage for gene based methods and the Kullback-Leibler divergence metric. Window methods are very sensitive but less specific and detect badly lone isolated gene. On the other hand gene based methods are often very specific but lack of sensitivity. We propose using two methods in combination to get the best of each category, a gene based one for specificity and a window based one for sensitivity.
| S-EPMC2848678 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Domestication is an excellent model for studies of adaptation because it involves recent and strong selection on a few, identified traits [1-5]. Few studies have focused on the domestication of fungi, with notable exceptions [6-11], despite their importance to bioindustry [12] and to a general understanding of adaptation in eukaryotes [5]. Penicillium fungi are ubiquitous molds among which two distantly related species have been independently selected for cheese making-P. roqueforti for blue cheeses like Roquefort and P. camemberti for soft cheeses like Camembert. The selected traits include morphology, aromatic profile, lipolytic and proteolytic activities, and ability to grow at low temperatures, in a matrix containing bacterial and fungal competitors [13-15]. By comparing the genomes of ten Penicillium species, we show that adaptation to cheese was associated with multiple recent horizontal transfers of large genomic regions carrying crucial metabolic genes. We identified seven horizontally transferred regions (HTRs) spanning more than 10 kb each, flanked by specific transposable elements, and displaying nearly 100% identity between distant Penicillium species. Two HTRs carried genes with functions involved in the utilization of cheese nutrients or competition and were found nearly identical in multiple strains and species of cheese-associated Penicillium fungi, indicating recent selective sweeps; they were experimentally associated with faster growth and greater competitiveness on cheese and contained genes highly expressed in the early stage of cheese maturation. These findings have industrial and food safety implications and improve our understanding of the processes of adaptation to rapid environmental changes.
| S-EPMC4598740 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Horizontal DNA transfer is an important factor of evolution and participates in biological diversity. Unfortunately, the location and length of horizontal transfers (HTs) are known for very few species. The usage of short oligonucleotides in a sequence (the so-called genomic signature) has been shown to be species-specific even in DNA fragments as short as 1 kb. The genomic signature is therefore proposed as a tool to detect HTs. Since DNA transfers originate from species with a signature different from those of the recipient species, the analysis of local variations of signature along recipient genome may allow for detecting exogenous DNA. The strategy consists in (i) scanning the genome with a sliding window, and calculating the corresponding local signature (ii) evaluating its deviation from the signature of the whole genome and (iii) looking for similar signatures in a database of genomic signatures. A total of 22 prokaryote genomes are analyzed in this way. It has been observed that atypical regions make up approximately 6% of each genome on the average. Most of the claimed HTs as well as new ones are detected. The origin of putative DNA transfers is looked for among approximately 12 000 species. Donor species are proposed and sometimes strongly suggested, considering similarity of signatures. Among the species studied, Bacillus subtilis, Haemophilus Influenzae and Escherichia coli are investigated by many authors and give the opportunity to perform a thorough comparison of most of the bioinformatics methods used to detect HTs.
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Project description:The Amoebozoa represent a clade of unicellular amoeboid organisms that display a wide variety of lifestyles, including free-living and parasitic species. For example, the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has the ability to aggregate into a multicellular fruiting body upon starvation, while the pathogenic amoeba Entamoeba histolytica is a parasite of humans. Globins are small heme proteins that are present in almost all extant organisms. Although several genomes of amoebozoan species have been sequenced, little is known about the phyletic distribution of globin genes within this phylum. Only two flavohemoglobins (FHbs) of D. discoideum have been reported and characterized previously while the genomes of Entamoeba species are apparently devoid of globin genes. We investigated eleven amoebozoan species for the presence of globin genes by genomic and phylogenetic in silico analyses. Additional FHb genes were identified in the genomes of four social amoebas and the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Moreover, a single-domain globin (SDFgb) of Hartmannella vermiformis, as well as two truncated hemoglobins (trHbs) of Acanthamoeba castellanii were identified. Phylogenetic evidence suggests that these globin genes were independently acquired via horizontal gene transfer from some ancestral bacteria. Furthermore, the phylogenetic tree of amoebozoan FHbs indicates that they do not share a common ancestry and that a transfer of FHbs from bacteria to amoeba occurred multiple times.
| S-EPMC4081604 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In earlier work, we introduced and discussed a generalized computational framework for identifying horizontal transfers. This framework relied on a gene's nucleotide composition, obviated the need for knowledge of codon boundaries and database searches, and was shown to perform very well across a wide range of archaeal and bacterial genomes when compared with previously published approaches, such as Codon Adaptation Index and C + G content. Nonetheless, two considerations remained outstanding: we wanted to further increase the sensitivity of detecting horizontal transfers and also to be able to apply the method to increasingly smaller genomes. In the discussion that follows, we present such a method, Wn-SVM, and show that it exhibits a very significant improvement in sensitivity compared with earlier approaches. Wn-SVM uses a one-class support-vector machine and can learn using rather small training sets. This property makes Wn-SVM particularly suitable for studying small-size genomes, similar to those of viruses, as well as the typically larger archaeal and bacterial genomes. We show experimentally that the new method results in a superior performance across a wide range of organisms and that it improves even upon our own earlier method by an average of 10% across all examined genomes. As a small-genome case study, we analyze the genome of the human cytomegalovirus and demonstrate that Wn-SVM correctly identifies regions that are known to be conserved and prototypical of all beta-herpesvirinae, regions that are known to have been acquired horizontally from the human host and, finally, regions that had not up to now been suspected to be horizontally transferred. Atypical region predictions for many eukaryotic viruses, including the alpha-, beta- and gamma-herpesvirinae, and 123 archaeal and bacterial genomes, have been made available online at http://cbcsrv.watson.ibm.com/HGT_SVM/.
| S-EPMC1174904 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Prokaryotes vary their protein repertoire mainly through horizontal transfer and gene loss. To elucidate the links between these processes and the cross-species gene-family statistics, we perform a large-scale data analysis of the cross-species variability of gene-family abundance (the number of members of the family found on a given genome). We find that abundance fluctuations are related to the rate of horizontal transfers. This is rationalized by a minimal theoretical model, which predicts this link. The families that are not captured by the model show abundance profiles that are markedly peaked around a mean value, possibly because of specific abundance selection. Based on these results, we define an abundance variability index that captures a family's evolutionary behavior (and thus some of its relevant functional properties) purely based on its cross-species abundance fluctuations. Analysis and model, combined, show a quantitative link between cross-species family abundance statistics and horizontal transfer dynamics, which can be used to analyze genome 'flux'. Groups of families with different values of the abundance variability index correspond to genome sub-parts having different plasticity in terms of the level of horizontal exchange allowed by natural selection.
| S-EPMC4066789 | biostudies-other