MBE Advance Access published online on February 12, 2004
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msh075
Molecular Biology and Evolution © Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution 2004; all rights reserved
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1 Department of Biological Sciences and Center for Comparative Genomics, University of Iowa, 210 Biology Building, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, United States
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dbhattac{at}blue.weeg.uiowa.edu.
The appearance of photosynthetic eukaryotes (algae and plants) dramatically altered the Earth's ecosystem, making possible all vertebrate life on land, including humans. Dating algal origin is, however, frustrated by a meager fossil record. We generated a plastid multi-gene phylogeny with Bayesian inference and then used maximum likelihood molecular clock methods to estimate algal divergence times. The plastid tree was used as a surrogate for algal host evolution because of recent phylogenetic evidence supporting the vertical ancestry of the plastid in the red, green, and glaucophyte algae. Nodes in the plastid tree were constrained with 6 reliable fossil dates and a maximum age of 3500 million years ago (Ma) based on the earliest known eubacterial fossil. Our analyses support an ancient (late Paleoproterozoic) origin of photosynthetic eukaryotes with the primary endosymbiosis that gave rise to the first alga having occurred after the split of the Plantae (i.e., red, green, and glaucophyte algae plus land plants) from the opisthokonts sometime before 1558 Ma. The split of the red and green algae is calculated to have occurred about 1500 Ma and the putative single red algal secondary endosymbiosis that gave rise to the plastid in the cryptophyte, haptophyte, and stramenopile algae (chromists) occurred about 1300 Ma. These dates, which are consistent with fossil evidence for putative marine algae (i.e., acritarchs) from the early Mesoproterozoic (1500 Ma) and with a major eukaryotic diversification in the very late Mesoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic, provide a molecular timeline for understanding algal evolution. Key Words:
algal origin, fossil record, molecular clock, divergence time estimates, plastid.
© 2004 Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
Original Articles
A Molecular Timeline for the Origin of Photosynthetic Eukaryotes
2 Dipartimento di Biologia vegetale, Università "Federico II", Via Foria 223, 80139 Napoli, Italy
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