Phylogenetic signal and functional categories in Proteobacteria genomes

BACKGROUND: A comprehensive evolutionary analysis of bacterial genomes implies to identify the hallmark of vertical and non-vertical signals and to discriminate them from the presence of mere phylogenetic noise. In this report we have addressed the impact of factors like the universal distribution of the genes, their essentiality or their functional role in the cell on the inference of vertical signal through phylogenomic methods. RESULTS: We have established that supermatrices derived from data sets composed mainly by genes suspected to be essential for bacterial cellular life perform better on the recovery of vertical signal than those composed by widely distributed genes. In addition, we show that the "Transcription" category of genes seems to harbor a better vertical signal than other functional categories. Moreover, the "Poorly characterized" category performs better than other categories related with metabolism or cellular processes. CONCLUSION: From these results we conclude that different data sets allow addressing different questions in phylogenomic analyses. The vertical signal seems to be more present in essential genes although these also include a significant degree of incongruence. From a functional perspective, as expected, informational genes perform better than operational ones but we have also shown the surprising behavior of poorly annotated genes, which points to their importance in the genome evolution of bacteria.