Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 15, 17-27, Copyright © 1998 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
R de Rosa and B Labedan
We have tried to approach the nature of the last common ancestor to
Haemophilus influenzae and Escherichia coli and to determine how each
bacterium could have diverged from this putative organism. The approach
used was exhaustive analysis of the homologous proteins coded by genes
present in these bacteria, using as criteria for sequence relatedness an
alignment of at least 80 amino acid residues and a PAM distance (number of
accepted point mutations per 100 residues separating two sequences) below
250. Evolutionarily significant similarities were found between 1,345 H.
influenzae proteins (85% of the total genome) and 3,058 E. coli. proteins
(75% of the total genome), many of them belonging to families of various
sizes (from 666 doublets to 35 large groups of more than 10 members).
Nearly all the genes found by this approach to be duplicated in both
bacteria were already duplicated in their last common ancestor. This was
deduced from (1) the comparison of the respective distributions of
evolutionary distances between orthologs (genes separated only by
speciation events) and paralogs (genes duplicated in the same genome) and
(2) the analysis of the phylogenetic trees reconstructed for each family of
paralogs containing at least two members belonging to each bacterium. The
distributions of the different categories of homologs show a significant
loss of paralogous genes in H. influenzae (reduction proportional to the
genome size), of many sequences which are still present in one copy in E.
coli, and of some entire gene families. Phylogenetic trees also confirmed
this recent loss of paralogous genes in H. influenzae. Thus, the genome
size of the last common ancestor of these two bacteria would have been
close to that of present-day E. coli, and the evolution of H. influenzae
toward a parasitic life led to an important decrease in its genome size by
some mechanism of streamlining. During this recent evolution, the memory of
the gene order present in the last common ancestor has been blurred, but a
few short conserved chromosomal fragments can still be detected in
present-day E. coli and H. influenzae.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The evolutionary relationships between the two bacteria Escherichia coli and Haemophilus influenzae and their putative last common ancestor
Institut de Genetique et Microbiologie, Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay, France.
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