Horizontal gene transfer constraint the evolution of regulatory code in the microbial world
Antonio Gomes - antluiz@gmail.com
Memorial Sloan Kelttering Cancer Center, New York, USA.
Synopsis
Microorganisms have the ability to acquire and use genetic material from the environment, via a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT). In order to be functional, the acquired genetic material needs to be recognized by the recipient regulatory machinery and expressed at levels that provide a fitness advantage for the cell. The regulatory machinery is mediated by sigma and transcription factors that recognize specific DNA sequences to initiate or block transcription. For this work, I provide a binary approximation to represent regulatory sequences and simulate the influence of HGT in the dynamics of evolution of the regulatory code. We observe that HGT provides a constraint in the diversity of possible regulatory codes. This result is consistent with experimental results and provide novel insights into evolution of microbial communities as well as opportunities for bioengineering and safety. For this presentation, I will present the necessary biological background and highlight how computational intelligence can be insightful to understand the evolution of gene regulation and HGT in microbial communities.
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Suggested readings
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Browning DF, Busby SJ. 2004. The regulation of bacterial transcription initiation. Nature reviews Microbiology 2: 57-65.
Soucy SM, Huang J, Gogarten JP, Horizontal gene transfer: building the web of life, Nature Reviews Genetics 16, 472–482 (2015)