The phrase "a putative instance of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing something that is assumed or supposed to be a particular example or case, often in a theoretical or speculative context.
Example: "The researchers presented a putative instance of the phenomenon, suggesting it could lead to new insights in the field."
Alternatives: "an alleged example of" or "a presumed case of".
Based largely on the mismatch of morphology (species ID), mtDNA, and microsatellites, and to a smaller extent on nuclear gene genealogies, we identified 11 putative instances of recent introgression between species identified using the DSC (i.e. the species as recently revised [ 25]).
Particularly significant enrichment of regions of sequence similarity was found in the 40 bp analysis, which identified 6 deletions with >10 bp identity the 3 putative instances of NAHR, 2 pairs of ends involving Alu family elements, and homology at the chromosome 1 deletion between an Alu poly-A tail and a low complexity AT-rich repeat.
Here, we analyzed putative instances of transfer (i.e., those with no phylogenetic support).
The latter represent putative instances of the lateral transfer of the entire open reading frame (or beyond) within the E. coli - Shigella lineage.
We identified 116 candidate interdomain LGT events, 22 putative instances of interdomain LGT followed by intradomain LGT, plus 287 possible intradomain LGT events (table 1 and fig. 1).
Putative instances of HGT are diagrammed in Figure 3. Additionally, transferred lysozymes in nonbacterial taxa were used as queries to identify homologs and make a second set of phylogenetic trees to confirm the HGT.
In relation to these concepts, the putative instances of morphological homoplasy in closely related gastrophrynines are of particular note, since many lineages have likely diversified not in changing environments but within stable fossorial environments [ 121].
To characterize this class, TRFLP peaks from soil-grown plants were first filtered out if they were also present in seed or in sand-grown plants (as these represented putative instances of vertical transmission).
We considered the remaining cases (1,476 cases) with no phylogenetic support to be putative instances of transfer, and these were analyzed further by searching for GO terms associated with their potential functions.
This study also provides i) a global analysis of HGT cases in different ecological niches, including protist and arthropods hosts and aquatic environments, and from diverse origins, such as prokaryotic, eukaryotic, archaeal and viral domains, and ii) gene functions resulting from putative instances of gene transfer.
