Category: Our papers

The Alphaproteobacteria is an extraordinarily diverse and ancient group of bacteria. Previous attempts to infer its deep phylogeny have been plagued with methodological artefacts. To overcome this, we analyzed a dataset of 200 single-copy and conserved genes and employed diverse strategies to reduce compositional artefacts. Such strategies include using novel dataset-specific profile mixture models and recoding schemes, and removing sites, genes and taxa that are compositionally biased. We show…

The phylum Apicomplexa is a quintessentially parasitic lineage, whose members infect a broad range of animals. One exception to this may be the apicomplexan genus Nephromyces, which has been described as having a mutualistic relationship with its host. Here we analyze transcriptome data from Nephromyces and its parasitic sister taxon, Cardiosporidium, revealing an ancestral purine degradation pathway thought to have been lost early in apicomplexan evolution. The predicted localization of many of…

All land plants must cope with phytopathogens. Algae face pathogens, too, and it is reasonable to assume that some of the strategies for dealing with pathogens evolved prior to the origin of embryophytes – plant terrestrialization simply changed the nature of the plant-pathogen interactions. Here we highlight that many potential components of the angiosperm defense toolkit are i) found in streptophyte algae and non-flowering embryophytes and ii) might be used in non-flowering plant defense as…

Red algal plastid genomes are often considered ancestral and evolutionarily stable, and thus more closely resembling the last common ancestral plastid genome of all photosynthetic eukaryotes [1, 2]. However, sampling of red algal diversity is still quite limited (e.g., [2-5]). We aimed to remedy this problem. To this end, we sequenced six new plastid genomes from four undersampled and phylogenetically disparate red algal classes (Porphyridiophyceae, Stylonematophyceae, Compsopogonophyceae, and…

The origin of land plants from algae is a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. It is becoming increasingly clear that many characters that were once assumed to be ’embryophyte specific’ can in fact be found in their closest algal relatives, the streptophyte algae. One such case is the phenylpropanoid pathway. While biochemical data indicate that streptophyte algae harbor lignin-like components, the phenylpropanoid core pathway, which serves as the backbone of lignin biosynthesis, has…

Mitochondria are the respiratory organelles of eukaryotes and their evolutionary history is deeply intertwined with that of eukaryotes. The compartmentalization of respiration in mitochondria occurs within cristae, whose evolutionary origin has remained unclear. Recent discoveries, however, have revived the old notion that mitochondrial cristae could have had a pre-endosymbiotic origin. Mitochondrial cristae are likely homologous to the intracytoplasmic membranes (ICMs) used by diverse…

A high degree of specialization between host and parasite is a well-known outcome of a long history of coevolution, and it is strikingly illustrated in a coordination of their life cycles. In some cases, the arms race ensued at the establishment of a symbiotic relationship results in the adoption of manipulative strategies by the parasite. We have already learned that Steinina ctenocephali, a gregarine living in the alimentary canal of cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis follows its phenology and…