Dating phototrophic microbial lineages with reticulate gene histories.

ABSTRACT: Phototrophic bacteria are among the most biogeochemically significant organisms on Earth and are physiologically related through the use of reaction centers to collect photons for energy metabolism. However, the major phototrophic lineages are not closely related to one another in bacterial phylogeny, and the origins of their respective photosynthetic machinery remain obscured by time and low sequence similarity. To better understand the co-evolution of Cyanobacteria and other ancient anoxygenic phototrophic lineages with respect to geologic time, we designed and implemented a variety of molecular clocks that use horizontal gene transfer (HGT) as additional, relative constraints. These HGT constraints improve the precision of phototroph divergence date estimates and indicate that stem gree

SUBMITTER: Magnabosco C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5873394 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature