Genome-wide detection of selection and other evolutionary forces

Zhuofei Xu*, Rui Zhou

*Corresponding author for this work

Abstract

As is well known, pathogenic microbes evolve rapidly to escape from the host immune system and antibiotics. Genetic variations among microbial populations occur frequently during the long-term pathogen–host evolutionary arms race, and individual mutation beneficial for the fitness can be fixed preferentially. Many recent comparative genomics studies have pointed out the importance of selective forces in the molecular evolution of bacterial pathogens. The public availability of large-scale next-generation sequencing data and many state-of-the-art statistical methods of molecular evolution enable us to scan genome-wide alignments for evidence of positive Darwinian selection, recombination, and other evolutionary forces operating on the coding regions. In this chapter, we describe an integrative analysis pipeline and its application to tracking featured evolutionary trajectories on the genome of an animal pathogen. The evolutionary analysis of the protein-coding part of the genomes will provide a wide spectrum oof genetic variations that play potential roles in adaptive evolution of bacteria.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBacterial pangenomics : methods and protocols
EditorsAlessio Mengoni, Marco Galardini, Marco Fondi
Number of pages17
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2015
Pages271-287
ISBN (Print)978-1-4939-1719-8
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4939-1720-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015
SeriesMethods in Molecular Biology
ISSN1064-3745

Keywords

  • Adaptive evolution
  • Bacteria
  • Intragenic homologous recombination
  • Positive selection
  • Sequence alignment

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