Visualizing Horizontal Gene Transfer Detection in Phylogenetically Divergent Bacteria

Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) plays an important and indispensable role in the evolution of bacterial genomes, serving as a mechanism that contributes to genetic diversity and enables adaptation across phylogenetically distant taxa. This study introduces an analysis tool implemented as an R package for detecting HGT events in diverse bacterial lineages. The tool combines the integration of a heat-map matrix with phylogenetic analysis visualization techniques to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of HGT event detection. We applied it to a diverse set of bacterial genomes from chicken and pig gut and expanded the results with established methods for HGT detection. The findings demonstrate the capability of our visualization techniques to pinpoint HGT events, offering a valuable tool for researchers to explore the intricate dynamics of bacterial genome evolution.