Abstract

Surrogate methods for detecting lateral gene transfer (LGT) are those that do not require inference of phylogenetic trees. Four surrogate methods were applied to the genome of Escherichia coli K12 to identify genes that may have arisen by LGT. Only two of these methods detect the same genes more frequently than expected by chance, whereas several intersections contain many fewer ORFs than expected. Each of the four methods detects a different nonrandom set of genes. I will discuss possible biological explanations.