GOHTAM: a website for 'Genomic Origin of Horizontal Transfers, Alignment and Metagenomics'.

Motivation: This website allows the detection of horizontal transfers based on a combination of parametric methods and proposes an origin by researching neighbors in a bank of genomic signatures. This bank is also used to research an origin to DNA fragments from metagenomics studies.

Results: Different services are provided like the possibility of inferring a phylogenetic tree with sequence signatures or comparing two genomes and displaying the rearrangements that happened since their separation.

A benchmark of parametric methods for horizontal transfers detection.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has appeared to be of importance for prokaryotic species evolution. As a consequence numerous parametric methods, using only the information embedded in the genomes, have been designed to detect HGTs. Numerous reports of incongruencies in results of the different methods applied to the same genomes were published.