Decoding Positive Selection in Mycobacterium tuberculosis with Phylogeny-Guided Graph Attention Models

Abstract

Positive selection drives the emergence of adaptive mutations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, shaping drug resistance, transmissibility, and virulence. Phylogenetic trees capture evolutionary relationships among isolates and provide a natural framework for detecting such adaptive signals. We present a phylogeny-guided graph attention network (GAT) approach, introducing a method for converting SNP-annotated phylogenetic trees into graph structures suitable for neural network analysis. Using 500 M. tuberculosis isolates from four major lineages and 249 single-nucleotide variants (84 resistance-associated and 165 neutral) across 61 drug-resistance genes, we constructed graphs where nodes represented isolates and edges reflected phylogenetic distances. Edges between isolates separated by more than seven internal nodes were pruned to emphasise local evolutionary structure. Node features encoded SNP presence or absence, and the GAT architecture included two attention layers, a residual connection, global attention pooling, and a multilayer perceptron classifier. The model achieved an accuracy of 0.88 on a held-out test set and, when applied to 146 WHO-classified "uncertain" variants, identified 41 candidates with convergent emergence across multiple lineages, consistent with adaptive evolution. This work demonstrates the feasibility of transforming phylogenies into GNN-compatible structures and highlights attention-based models as effective tools for detecting positive selection, aiding genomic surveillance and variant prioritisation.