Convergence in Amino Acid Outsourcing Between Animals and Predatory Bacteria.

ABSTRACT: All animals have outsourced about half of the 20 proteinogenic amino acids (AAs). We recently demonstrated that the loss of biosynthetic pathways for these outsourced AAs is driven by energy-saving selection. Paradoxically, these metabolic simplifications enabled animals to use costly AAs more frequently in their proteomes, allowing them to explore sequence space more freely. Based on these findings, we proposed that environmental AA availability and cellular respiration mode are the two primary factors determining the evolution of AA auxotrophies in animals. Remarkably, our recent analysis showed that bacterial AA auxotrophies are also governed by energy-related selection, thereby roughly converging with animals. However, bacterial AA auxotrophies are highly heterogeneous and scattered ac

SUBMITTER: Kasalo N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11988736 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature