HgtSIM: a simulator for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in microbial communities

The development and application of metagenomic approaches have provided an opportunity to study and define horizontal gene transfer (HGT) on the level of microbial communities. However, no current metagenomic data simulation tools offers the option to introduce defined HGT within a microbial communi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weizhi Song, Kerrin Steensen, Torsten Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: PeerJ Inc. 2017-11-01
Series:PeerJ
Subjects:
Online Access:https://peerj.com/articles/4015.pdf
Description
Summary:The development and application of metagenomic approaches have provided an opportunity to study and define horizontal gene transfer (HGT) on the level of microbial communities. However, no current metagenomic data simulation tools offers the option to introduce defined HGT within a microbial community. Here, we present HgtSIM, a pipeline to simulate HGT event among microbial community members with user-defined mutation levels. It was developed for testing and benchmarking pipelines for recovering HGTs from complex microbial datasets. HgtSIM is implemented in Python3 and is freely available at: https://github.com/songweizhi/HgtSIM.
ISSN:2167-8359