Bolotin Evgeni, Hershberg Ruth
Rachel and Menachem Mendelovitch Evolutionary Processes of Mutation and Natural Selection Research Laboratory, The Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences, Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of TechnologyHaifa, Israel.
Front Microbiol. 2017 Aug 25;8:1536. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.01536. eCollection 2017.
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) serves as an important source of innovation for bacterial species. We used a pangenome-based approach to identify genes that were horizontally acquired by four closely related bacterial species, belonging to the family. This enabled us to examine the extent to which such closely related species tend to share horizontally acquired genes. We find that a high percent of horizontally acquired genes are shared among these closely related species. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of sharing of horizontally acquired genes among these four closely related species is predictive of the extent to which these genes will be found in additional bacterial species. Finally, we show that acquired genes shared by more species tend to be better optimized for expression within the genomes of their new hosts. Combined, our results demonstrate the existence of a large pool of frequently horizontally acquired genes that have distinct characteristics from horizontally acquired genes that are less frequently shared between species.
水平基因转移（HGT）是细菌物种创新的重要来源。我们采用了基于泛基因组的方法来鉴定属于该家族的四个密切相关细菌物种通过水平方式获得的基因。这使我们能够研究这些密切相关的物种在多大程度上倾向于共享水平获得的基因。我们发现，在这些密切相关的物种中，很大比例的水平获得基因是共享的。此外，我们证明，这四个密切相关物种之间水平获得基因的共享程度可预测这些基因在其他细菌物种中的存在程度。最后，我们表明，被更多物种共享的获得基因往往在其新宿主的基因组内表达方面得到了更好的优化。综合来看，我们的结果表明存在大量经常通过水平方式获得的基因库，这些基因具有与物种间较少共享的水平获得基因不同的特征。
