Response to ‘Refined analyses suggest that recombination is a minor source of genomic diversity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa chronic cystic fibrosis infections’ by Williams et al. (2016)

The paper ‘Refined analyses suggest that recombination is a minor source of genomic diversity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa chronic cystic fibrosis infections’ by Williams et al. (2016) performs a new analysis on data from a recent paper of ours where we found that recombination plays a significant role in generating phenotypic and genomic diversity in P. aeruginosa populations taken from the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients (Darch et al., 2015). They compare our dataset with a recent dataset of their own (Williams et al., 2015) and conclude that whilst recombination exists, it has only a small effect on population heterogeneity when compared with de novo mutation.