Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology

TL;DR

This paper reviews how statistical physics concepts can be applied to understand horizontal gene transfer and genome evolution in microbes, highlighting the analogy to annealing and information entropy, supported by marine microbial genome data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework linking statistical mechanics to microbial genome evolution and gene transfer, with empirical validation from oceanic microbial genome data.

Findings

Genome evolution resembles annealing processes.

Genomes exhibit properties analogous to information entropy.

Transposon variation with ocean depth matches predictions.

Abstract

The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living cells communicate genetically through transferred genes, as well as the ways in which they can reorganize their genomes in response to environmental pressure. We discuss how genome evolution can be thought of as related to the physical phenomenon of annealing, and describe the sense in which genomes can be said to exhibit an analogue of information entropy. As a direct application of these ideas, we analyze the variation with ocean depth of transposons in marine microbial genomes, predicting trends that are consistent with recent observations using metagenomic surveys.