Who is Who in Phylogenetic Networks

Publications of William Martin     Order by:   Type | Year

Associated keywords

explicit-network from-sequences from-species-tree heuristic lateral-gene-transfer minimal-lateral-network phylogenetic-network phylogeny Program-lingpy reconstruction

Article (Journal)

1 Johann-Mattis List, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, Hans Geisler and William Martin. Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution. In BioEssays, Vol. 36(2):141-150, 2014. Keywords: explicit network, minimal lateral network, phylogenetic network, Program lingpy. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bies.201300096.         Toggle abstract "Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution. Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Linguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics. © 2014 The Authors. BioEssays Published by WILEY Periodicals, Inc." 2 Tal Dagan, Yael Artzy-Randrup and William Martin. Modular networks and cumulative impact of lateral transfer in prokaryote genome evolution. In PNAS, Vol. 105:10039-10044, 2008. Keywords: from sequences, from species tree, heuristic, lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0800679105.         Toggle abstract "Lateral gene transfer is an important mechanism of natural variation among prokaryotes, but the significance of its quantitative contribution to genome evolution is debated. Here, we report networks that capture both vertical and lateral components of evolutionary history among 539,723 genes distributed across 181 sequenced prokaryotic genomes. Partitioning of these networks by an eigenspectrum analysis identifies community structure in prokaryotic gene-sharing networks, the modules of which do not correspond to a strictly hierarchical prokaryotic classification. Our results indicate that, on average, at least 81 ± 15% of the genes in each genome studied were involved in lateral gene transfer at some point in their history, even though they can be vertically inherited after acquisition, uncovering a substantial cumulative effect of lateral gene transfer on longer evolutionary time scales. © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA."