ArticleeLife2021
Identical sequences found in distant genomes reveal frequent horizontal transfer across the bacterial domain.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Shuttling, swapping, and mixing: the rapid modular evolution of antiviral repertoires in temperate phages and their satellites.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- The Fate of Horizontally Acquired Genes: Rapid Initial Turnover Followed by Long-Term Persistence.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Reconstructing the Network of Horizontal Gene Exchange in Bacteria to Differentiate Direct and Indirect Transfers.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- A 'Genome-First' Framework for Next-Generation Bioinputs: From Functional Mining to Rational Synthetic Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Carbapenem-ResistantAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Systematic characterization of PBP2 as the primary siderophore recognizer inMicrobial genomics · 2026Article
- Assessing the Ecological Roles of Resistomes within Microbial Communities in Antibiotic-contaminated Ecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- Co-occurrence is associated with horizontal gene transfer across marine bacteria independent of phylogeny.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Deciphering gene redundancy in prokaryotic genomes provides evolutionary insights for pathogenicity and its roles in clinical infections.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- CarpeDeam: a de novo metagenome assembler for heavily damaged ancient datasets.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Co-occurrence is associated with horizontal gene transfer across marine bacteria independent of phylogeny.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic relatedness rather than aquatic habitat fosters horizontal transfer of transposable elements in animals.Genome research · 2025Article
- Gene-level analysis of core carbohydrate metabolism across the Enterobacteriaceae pan-genome.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Unraveling the tempo and mode of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria.Trends in microbiology · 2025Review
- Within-host bacterial evolution and the emergence of pathogenicity.Nature microbiology · 2025Review
- The defensome of prokaryotes in aquifers.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Horizontal Gene Transfer Inference: Gene Presence-Absence Outperforms Gene Trees.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Small amounts of misassembly can have disproportionate effects on pangenome-based metagenomic analyses.mSphere · 2025Article
- Exploration of the genetic landscape of bacterial dsDNA viruses reveals an ANI gap amid extensive mosaicism.mSystems · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.