A neutral theory of bacterial population genomics

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Peter Pfaffelhuber
• Subject Area: Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 173320740

Modern evolutionary theory aims at understanding the sources and consequences of biological diversity. It is becoming clear that prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) provide the richest source of biological diversity on a genomic level. The recently developed infinitely many genes model gives a theoretical approach for genome evolution by studying random patterns of presence and absence of genes in a population sample from a bacterial species (Baumdicker, Hess, Pfaffelhuber, Annals of Applied Probability, in press, 2009). In this project we extend this model in several directions: (i) We implement lateral gene transfer into the model, which is known to be an important biological factor; (ii) We obtain the probability distribution for diversity within genes on the level of DNA sequences; (iii) In order to make our models applicable to the increasing amount of available genomic data, we study inference in the proposed models. The project is a first step to the quantitative understanding of evolutionary forces which shape the vast genomic diversity in prokaryotes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants