Variations in recombination rates across Escherichia coli populations

The accumulation of bacterial genomic datasets has created a nuanced and difficult challenge for computational analyses. Based on the current trend of genomes being sequenced, it appears that it won’t be possible to infer complex parameters such as recombination rates for these entire genomic datasets. We assessed the impact different sampling strategies had on recombination rate estimates, along with the impact of gene content and population structure on recombination rate estimates. Overall, we found that while our novel framework yielded consistent estimates of recombination rates, our sampling strategies, population structure, and gene content did not significantly impact recombination rate estimates