Identifying Currents in the Gene Pool for Bacterial Populations Using an Integrative Approach

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Abstract
The evolution of bacterial populations has recently become considerably better understood due to large-scale sequencing of population samples. It has become clear that DNA sequences from a multitude of genes, as well as a broad sample coverage of a target population, are needed to obtain a relatively unbiased view of its genetic structure and the patterns of ancestry connected to the strains. However, the traditional statistical methods for evolutionary inference, such as phylogenetic analysis, are associated with several difficulties under such an extensive sampling scenario, in particular when a considerable amount of recombination is anticipated to have taken place. To meet the needs of large-scale analyses of population structure for bacteria, we introduce here several statistical tools for the detection and representation of recombination between populations. Also, we introduce a model-based description of the shape of a population in sequence space, in terms of its molecular variability and affinity towards other populations. Extensive real data from the genus Neisseria are utilized to demonstrate the potential of an approach where these population genetic tools are combined with an phylogenetic analysis. The statistical tools introduced here are freely available in BAPS 5.2 software, which can be downloaded from http://web.abo.fi/fak/mnf/mate/jc/software/baps.html. The study of bacterial population biology is complicated by the fact that, although bacteria are largely asexual, they can also exchange genetic materials through homologous recombination. Unlike eukaryotes, recombination in bacteria is not an obligatory process. Furthermore, the recombination mechanisms are subject to many biological and ecological factors that can vary even within different populations of the same species. Although increasing evidence for homologous recombination has been found in many bacterial species, determining the frequency of recombination and understanding the influence that it exerts upon the evolution of bacterial populations remains a challenging work. In this article, we provide a dynamic picture of recombination within and between closely related bacteria species. Through an integration of several Bayesian statistical models, our method highlights the importance of a quantitative estimation of recombination. Our analyses of a challenging multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) database demonstrate that combined analyses using both traditional phylogenetic methods, explorative MLST tools and Bayesian population genetic models can together yield interesting biological insights that cannot easily be reached by any of the approaches alone.