Horizontal Gene Transfer And Genome Evolution

Horizontal gene transfer (lateral gene transfer), the transfer of genetic materialsbetween different species,has been widely recognized as one of the major forces inprokaryotic genome evolution.Large scale genome analysis will advance the systematical understanding of HGTin the context of microorganism genome evolution。 We developed one combinedmethod to identify the horizontal gene transfer events in 82 microorganism genomesand construct the horizontally transferred genes database. Based on this work, weinvestigate the functional distribution mode of horizontally transferred genes andevaluate the influence of horizontal gene transfer over the organization and evolutionof biological pathways. The clarification of these two issues may shed light on theunderstanding of the behavior and mode of HGT in microorganism genome evolution.Through the identification of horizontal gene transfer and its direction, wedeveloped one method to solve the problem of gene/species tree reconciliation withthe consideration of horizontal gene transfer. This system will give the possibility toapply the evolutionary analysis method to gene/protein family analysis and genefunction annotation in microorganism.This general approach is very suitable to analysis the gene/protein family withcomplex evolutionary history to finish the jobs including evolutionary trace,orthology/papralogy identification and gene function annotation. It is significant inthe field of comparative genome and evolutionary genome.