Section: New Results

Lateral gene transfer as a support for the tree of life

We published with Sophie Abby the last results of her PhD work that apply an explicit phylogenetic model of horizontal gene transfer to bacterial and archaeal phyla [1] . We showed that lateral gene transfer allows to discriminate between phylogenetic hypotheses, and that in a typical bacterial gene family, 96-98% of tree branches result from vertical descent and 2-4% from lateral gene transfer.