A Comprehensive Study of Cyanobacterial Morphological and Ecological Evolutionary Dynamics through Deep Geologic Time.

ABSTRACT: Cyanobacteria have exerted a profound influence on the progressive oxygenation of Earth. As a complementary approach to examining the geologic record-phylogenomic and trait evolutionary analyses of extant species can lead to new insights. We constructed new phylogenomic trees and analyzed phenotypic trait data using novel phylogenetic comparative methods. We elucidated the dynamics of trait evolution in Cyanobacteria over billion-year timescales, and provide evidence that major geologic events in early Earth's history have shaped-and been shaped by-evolution in Cyanobacteria. We identify a robust core cyanobacterial phylogeny and a smaller set of taxa that exhibit long-branch attraction artifacts. We estimated the age of nodes and reconstruct the ancestral character states of 43 phenotypic

SUBMITTER: Uyeda JC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5029880 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature