An Event-Driven Approach for Studying Gene Block Evolution in Bacteria

TL;DR

This paper introduces an event-driven method to study gene block evolution in bacteria, enabling the analysis of gene gain, loss, duplication, and restructuring to understand their formation and evolutionary dynamics.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel event-based approach applicable to all gene blocks, allowing comprehensive analysis of their evolutionary processes in bacteria.

Findings

Gene block evolution can be described by a small set of events.

The method determines evolutionary rates of gene blocks.

It traces ancestral states of gene block formation.

Abstract

Motivation: Gene blocks are genes co-located on the chromosome. In many cases, genes blocks are conserved between bacterial species, sometimes as operons, when genes are co-transcribed. The conservation is rarely absolute: gene loss, gain, duplication, block splitting, and block fusion are frequently observed. An open question in bacterial molecular evolution is that of the formation and breakup of gene blocks, for which several models have been proposed. These models, however, are not generally applicable to all types of gene blocks, and consequently cannot be used to broadly compare and study gene block evolution. To address this problem we introduce an event-based method for tracking gene block evolution in bacteria. Results: We show here that the evolution of gene blocks in proteobacteria can be described by a small set of events. Those include the insertion of genes into, or the splitting of genes out of a gene block, gene loss, and gene duplication. We show how the event-based method of gene block evolution allows us to determine the evolutionary rate, and to trace the ancestral states of their formation. We conclude that the event-based method can be used to help us understand the formation of these important bacterial genomic structures. Availability: The software is available under GPLv3 license on http://github.com/reamdc1/gene_block_evolution.git Supplementary online material: http://iddo-friedberg.net/operon-evolution Contact: Iddo Friedberg i.friedberg@miamioh.edu