FanGe

Research Interest:

Estimating frquency of horiznontal gene transfer(HGT) in microbial genomes.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important evolutionary phenomenon, and it has been suggested to be so widespread in many microbial genomes, indicated by the incongruence among gene phylogenies, that it might be the “essence of phylogeny” and leave the dichotomy form of life tree at risk. However, the results of the prevalence of HGT from previous studies might have been biased, due to the methodological limitations in HGT inference, such as the analysis of GC contents. We are intersted in developing robust statistical methods based on the comparisons of phylogenetic trees approximate HGT frequency.

Reference:

Doolittle, WF. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science. 284:2124-2128.

Garcia-Vallve S, Romeu A, Palau J. (2000) Horizontal gene transfer in bacterial and archaeal complete genomes. Genome Res. 10(11):1719-25.

Kim, J., and Salisbury, B. (2001). A tree obscured by vines: horizontal gene transfer and the median tree method of estimating species phylogeny. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. 6:571-582.

Daubin V, Moran NA, Ochman H. Phylogenetics and the cohesion of bacterial genomes. Science. 2003 Aug 8;301(5634):829-32.