Figure 6.

Prediction of the future effect of mutation and recombination on the genetic distance between pairs of B. cereus genomes. The heat map at the top indicates the rate at which mutation will increase the distance between all pairs of genomes (i.e., pairwise divergence). The heat map at the bottom indicates the rate at which recombination will decrease these same distances (i.e., pairwise convergence). For closely related isolates, recombination leads to divergence, which is shown as zero convergence. The rate at which mutation causes divergence is an order of magnitude higher than the rate at which recombination leads to convergence. Thus in these isolates, the overall short-term impact of recombination and mutation is divergence of the isolates.