Modularity of stress response evolution.

ABSTRACT: Responses to extracellular stress directly confer survival fitness by means of complex regulatory networks. Despite their complexity, the networks must be evolvable because of changing ecological and environmental pressures. Although the regulatory networks underlying stress responses are characterized extensively, their mechanism of evolution remains poorly understood. Here, we examine the evolution of three candidate stress response networks (chemotaxis, competence for DNA uptake, and endospore formation) by analyzing their phylogenetic distribution across several hundred diverse bacterial and archaeal lineages. We report that genes in the chemotaxis and sporulation networks group into well defined evolutionary modules with distinct functions, phenotypes, and substitution rates as compar

SUBMITTER: Singh AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2396705 | biostudies-literature | 2008 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature