Bacterial Speciation: Genetic Sweeps in Bacterial Species

Bacterial Speciation: Genetic Sweeps in Bacterial Species

One theory of bacterial speciation states that bacterial and animal species share the property of cohesion, meaning that diversity within a species is constrained. A new study provides direct evidence that genome-wide sweeps can limit diversity within bacterial species.

Bacterial species and speciation.

Bacteria are profoundly different from eukaryotes in their patterns of genetic exchange. Nevertheless, ecological diversity is organized in the same way across all of life: individual organisms fall into more less discrete clusters on the basis of their phenotypic, ecological, and DNA sequence characteristics. Each sequence cluster in the bacterial world appears to correspond to an "ecotype," d...

Speciation trajectories in recombining bacterial species

It is generally agreed that bacterial diversity can be classified into genetically and ecologically cohesive units, but what produces such variation is a topic of intensive research. Recombination may maintain coherent species of frequently recombining bacteria, but the emergence of distinct clusters within a recombining species, and the impact of habitat structure in this process are not well ...

Modelling bacterial speciation

A central problem in understanding bacterial speciation is how clusters of closely related strains emerge and persist in the face of recombination. We use a neutral Fisher-Wright model in which genotypes, defined by the alleles at 140 house-keeping loci, change in each generation by mutation or recombination, and examine conditions in which an initially uniform population gives rise to resolved...

Comparative Study of L-asparaginase Activity in Different Bacterial Species