Work

Large-Scale Phylogenomic Analyses Indicate a Deep Origin of Primary Plastids within Cyanobacteria

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: The emergence of photosynthetic eukaryotes has played a crucial role in evolution and has strongly modified earth's ecology. Several phylogenetic analyses have established that primary plastids arose from a cyanobacterium through endosymbiosis. However, the question of which present-day cyanobacterial lineage is most closely related to primary plastids has been unclear. Here, we have performed an extensive phylogenomic investigation on the origin of primary plastids based on the analysis of up to 191 protein markers and over 30,000 aligned amino acid sites from 22 primary photosynthetic eukaryotes and 61 cyanobacteria representing a wide taxonomic sampling of this phylum. By using a number of solutions to circumvent a large range of systematic errors, we have reconstructed a robust global phylogeny of cyanobacteria and studied the placement of primary plastids within it. Our results strongly support an early emergence of primary plastids within cyanobacteria, prior to the diversification of most present-day cyanobacterial lineages for which genomic data are available.

Source: Molecular Biology and Evolution

DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msr108

Authors: Alexis Criscuolo, Simonetta Gribaldo

Institution: Institut Pasteur

Language: English

Topic: Protist diversity and phylogeny

Subfield: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

Field: Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Award: Origin and evolution of Cyanobacteria, oxygenic photosynthesis, and plastids: a combined approach based on phylogenomics and molecular techniques