What is it about?
Phylogenetic trees help us understand how species, e.g. bacteria, got to be the way they are, and help us distinguish one species from another that may look the same, but behave very differently. Bacteria are really good at grabbing DNA from other species, or other stains of the same species, so if the new bit of DNA is useful, that bacteria propagates. This is not a problem for them - why go to the bother of evolving when you can grab useful bits from another species? However, it is a problem for human observers who are trying to make sense of which bacterium came from where using phylogenetic trees because you need to be sure that the DNA you are looking at really belongs to the bacterium you think it belongs to.
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Why is it important?
The new method aims to find those strains that are relatively free from imported DNA, rather than simply removing those bits that look like they don't belong. This produces are much clearer tree. in the example that is provided in the paper, we have discovered a new clade of the stomach dwelling pathogen, Helicobacter pylori that combines elements from a strain carried by Aboriginal Australians and a strain carried by Europeans. We believe this recapitulates the settlement of Western Australia around 200 years ago.
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This page is a summary of: A novel taxon selection method, aimed at minimizing recombination, clarifies the discovery of a new sub‐population of
Helicobacter pylori
from Australia, Evolutionary Applications, September 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/eva.12864.
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