Dating the Bacterial Tree of Life Based on Ancient Symbiosis.

ABSTRACT: Obtaining a timescale for bacterial evolution is crucial to understand early life evolution but is difficult owing to the scarcity of bacterial fossils. Here, we introduce multiple new time constraints to calibrate bacterial evolution based on ancient symbiosis. This idea is implemented using a bacterial tree constructed with genes found in the mitochondrial lineages phylogenetically embedded within Proteobacteria. The expanded mitochondria-bacterial tree allows the node age constraints of eukaryotes established by their abundant fossils to be propagated to ancient co-evolving bacterial symbionts and across the bacterial tree of life. Importantly, we formulate a new probabilistic framework that considers uncertainty in inference of the ancestral lifestyle of modern symbionts to apply 19 re

SUBMITTER: Wang S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12640082 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature