Phylogenomic Analyses Reveal that Panguiarchaeum Is a Clade of Genome-Reduced Asgard Archaea Within the Njordarchaeia.

ABSTRACT: The Asgard archaea are a diverse archaeal phylum important for our understanding of cellular evolution because they include the lineage that gave rise to eukaryotes. Recent phylogenomic work has focused on characterizing the diversity of Asgard archaea in an effort to identify the closest extant relatives of eukaryotes. However, resolving archaeal phylogeny is challenging, and the positions of 2 recently described lineages-Njordarchaeales and Panguiarchaeales-are uncertain, in ways that directly bear on hypotheses of early evolution. In initial phylogenetic analyses, these lineages branched either with Asgards or with the distantly related Korarchaeota, and it has been suggested that their genomes may be affected by metagenomic contamination. Resolving this debate is important because thes

SUBMITTER: Huang WC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12411855 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature