Data from: The landscape of realized homologous recombination in pathogenic bacteria

Recombination enhances the adaptive potential of organisms by allowing
genetic variants to be tested on multiple genomic backgrounds. Its
distribution in the genome can provide insight into the evolutionary
forces that underlie traits such as the emergence of pathogenicity. Here
we examined landscapes of realized homologous recombination of 500 genomes
from ten bacterial species, and found all species have ‘hot’ regions with
elevated rates relative to the genome average. We examined the size, gene
content and chromosomal features associated with these regions and the
correlations between closely related species. The recombination landscape
is variable and evolves rapidly. For example in Salmonella, only short
regions of around 1kb in length are hot while in the closely related
species Escherichia coli, some hot regions exceed 100kb, spanning many
genes. Only Streptococcus pyogenes shows evidence for the positive
correlation between GC content and recombination that has been reported
for several eukaryotes. Genes with function related to the cell
surface/membrane are often found in recombination hot regions but E. coli
is the only species where genes annotated as “virulence associated” are
consistently hotter. There is also evidence that some genes with
“housekeeping” functions tend to be overrepresented in cold regions. For
example, ribosomal proteins showed low recombination in all of the
species. Among specific genes, transferrin binding proteins are
recombination hot in all three of the species in which they were found,
and are subject to inter-species recombination.