ArticleFEMS microbiology letters2025
Surprising effects of differential loss in genome evolution: the last-one-out.
Article in FEMS microbiology letters, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- What impact do new homologs have on detecting interdomain horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes? A reassessment of Katz (2015).Biology open · 2026Article
- A machine learning framework for interpreting phylogenetic tree patterns in interkingdom horizontal gene transfer.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Interkingdom horizontal gene transfer in plants: a perspective on methodological limitations and evolutionary alternatives.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- The Functional State ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Molecular architecture of giant viruses infecting microbial eukaryotes (protists).Biotechnologia · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Gene loss is an important process in genome evolution, though its power is often underestimated. If a gene is present at the root of a phylogenetic tree and can be lost in one lineage across the tree, it can potentially be lost in all, leading to gene extinction. Just before gene extinction, there will be one lineage that still retains the gene, generating a "last-one-out" distribution. Such an isolated gene presence will emulate the result of recent lateral gene acquisition, even though its distribution was generated by loss. How probable is it to observe "last-one-out" distributions in real data? Here, we mathematically derive this probability and find that it is surprisingly high, depending upon the tree and the gene loss rate. Examples from real data show that loss can readily account for observed frequencies of last-one-out gene distributions that might otherwise be attributed to lateral gene transfer.
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