Reconstructing the network of horizontal gene exchange in bacteria to differentiate direct and indirect transfers
Journal: bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Year: 2025

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays a central role in bacterial evolution. Yet, its large-scale dynamics and underlying network structure remain poorly characterized. We present a theoretical framework that models HGT as a continuous stochastic process over a network of bacterial genera and analyze its genomic footprint via the distribution of exact sequence matches shared across taxa---the match length distribution (MLD). We show that different evolutionary regimes imprint distinct statistical