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
