Evolutionary innovation through fusion of sequences from across the tree of life

We hypothesized that fusion of genes acquired via horizontal gene transfer (HGT) with endogenous sequences in arthropod genomes might generate what we call “HGT-chimeras”: genes with regions of non-metazoan and metazoan descent in the same open reading frame. This dataset supports the study of these HGT-chimeras presented in our manuscript “Evolutionary innovation through fusion of sequences from across the tree of life”. It includes input data and intermediate output files used in our HGT-chimera detection pipeline, as well as in the downstream bioinformatic characterization of these genes. The repository contains FASTA files of protein sequences, clustering results, phylogenetic trees, and tabular summaries of inferred HGT-chimeras, along with downstream analyses describing sequence molecular evolution (dN/dS), phylogenetic origin, gene expression, and domain architecture. Files are organized to correspond with steps in the associated GitHub pipeline, beginning with input clustering d..., , # Data from: Evolutionary innovation through fusion of sequences from across the tree of life

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwtdz](10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwtdz)

## Description of the data and file structure

Full details of data processing and analysis are described in the accompanying manuscript and [GitHub repository](https://github.com/rishabhrajkapoor/Arthropod-HGT-chimeras-2025/tree/main).

#### Files and variables

**mmseq_cluster_representatives_with_missing.fasta**

FASTA file of 610,359 proteins as input to the HGT-chimera detection pipeline. Obtained via MMseqs2 clustering of proteins from 319 RefSeq arthropod genome annotations supplemented with 11 proteins from the same annotations that were obtained in a previous pilot iteration of this pipeline. FASTA headers have been set as  \"genome accession;protein accession\".

**round1_diamond_output.tar.gz**

Tabular output of DIAMOND BLASTp search of mmseq_cluster_representatives_with_missing.fasta vs NR, with standard DIAMOND BLASTp...,