Genome evolution is not always shaped by a Darwinian-fashion of vertical inheritance from ancestral lineages. The historical gene content of a species contains many atypical gene sequences showing high similarity to those of distantly related taxa. This evolutionary phenomenon is referred to as lateral gene transfer (LGT). Lateral gene transfer permits the exchange of genetic material across lineages, completely ignoring any concept of taxonomic boundary. The rapid acquisition of foreign genes into bacterial genomes has greatly obscured the historical phylogeny of prokaryotes. In this thesis we calculate the rate of LGT on a Bacillaceae phylogeny, to determine the extent to which it controls species evolution. First, we examined the evolution of the phylogeny according to a simple model of maximum likelihood. We assume equal rates of gene insertion and deletion on the phylogeny and show high rates of evolution in the genomes of B. anthracis, B. cereus, and B. thuringiensis (Bc group), representative of adaptive evolution. We then improved the model to account for differential rates of gene insertion and deletion, thus offering a more realistic model of gene evolution. Again, we demonstrate that members of the Bc group are rapidly evolving, with the rate of gene insertion being significantly higher than the rated of gene deletion. Finally, we evaluate the sole effect of LGT on the phylogeny in a simple birth-death analysis with immigration. We show that LGT is the main vehicle of gene acquisition when the number of gene families substantially increases from external taxa to members of the Bc group. Collectively, our findings suggest that the Bacillaceae genome is rapidly expanding, and that laterally transferred genes may facilitate adaptive evolution and subsistence in a new niche.

Master of Science (MSc)

Thesis