Correction

Uncovering rate variation of lateral gene transfer during bacterial genome evolution

Weilong Hao and G Brian Golding^*

• * Corresponding author: G Brian Golding golding@mcmaster.ca

Author Affiliations

Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8S 4K1

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BMC Genomics 2008, 9:556 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-9-556

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/556

Received:	20 October 2008
Accepted:	25 November 2008
Published:	25 November 2008

© 2008 Hao and Golding; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Formula display:

Correction

On page 11 of our publication [1], the correction for missing data in a discrete Γ distribution was conducted as

This correction, equation (1), is only correct when the category probabilities p_j have no effect on observability. Because the category probabilities have an effect on observability, the appropriate correction is

Here N is the total number of gene families and M is the number of rate categories. Analyses based on equation (2) as opposed to equation (1) revealed remarkably similar results and all conclusions made based on the old method remain qualitatively unchanged. The additional analyses and the altered tables are provided in Additional File 1 and also available at http://evol.mcmaster.ca/~weilong/research.html webcite. We thank Dr. Matt Spencer for pointing out the difference in averaging methods and thank Drs. David Bryant, Ofir Cohen, Miklós Csűrös, Tal Pupko, and Ed Susko for communication of ideas.

References