Database Bias in the Detection of Interdomain Horizontal Gene Transfer Events in Pezizomycotina

Abstract

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a widely acknowledged phenomenon in prokaryotes for generating genetic diversity. However, the impact of this process in eukaryotes, particularly interdomain HGT, is a topic of debate. Although there have been observed biases in interdomain HGT detection, little exploration has been conducted on the effects of imbalanced databases. In our study, we conducted experiments to assess how different databases affect the detection of interdomain HGT using proteomes from the Pezizomycotina fungal subphylum as our focus group. Our objective was to simulate the database imbalance commonly found in public biological databases, where bacterial and eukaryotic sequences are unevenly represented, and demonstrate that an increase in uploaded eukaryotic sequences leads to a decrease in predicted HGTs. For our experiments, four databases with varying proportions of eukaryotic sequences but consistent proportions of bacterial sequences were utilized. We observed a significant reduction in detected interdomain HGT candidates as the proportion of eukaryotes increased within the database. Our data suggest that the imbalance in databases bias the interdomain HGT detection and highlights challenges associated with confirming the presence of interdomain HGT among Pezizomycotina fungi and potentially other groups within Eukarya.