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MBE Advance Access published online on January 9, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn006
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Toxicology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Article

A phylogenomic investigation into the origin of Metazoa

Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo1,2,*, Andrew J. Roger1, Gertraud Burger3, Michael W. Gray1 and B. Franz Lang3

1 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University. Tupper Building, 5850 College Street, Halifax, NS, B3H 1X5, Canada
2 ICREA Researcher at Departament de Genètica, Universitat de Barcelona. Av. Diagonal, 645 2nd floor-annex building. 08028 Barcelona, Spain
3 Robert Cedergren Center for Bioinformatics and Genomics, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Program in Evolutionary Biology, Département de Biochimie, Université de Montréal, 2900 Boulevard Edouard-Montpetit, C.P. 6128, Montréal (Québec), H3T 1J4, Canada

* Corresponding author: Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo ( inaki.ruiz{at}icrea.es), ICREA Researcher at Departament de Genètica, Universitat de Barcelona., Av. Diagonal, 645 2nd floor-annex building. 08028 Barcelona, Spain., Phone: 34-93-4035304, Fax: 34-93-4034420

Received for publication November 2, 2007. Revision received December 25, 2007. Accepted for publication December 29, 2007.

The evolution of multicellular animals (Metazoa) from their unicellular ancestors was a key transition that was accompanied by the emergence and diversification of gene families associated with multicellularity. To clarify the timing and order of specific events in this transition, we conducted expressed sequence tag (EST) surveys on four putative protistan relatives of Metazoa including the choanoflagellate Monosiga ovata, the ichthyosporeans Sphaeroforma arctica and Amoebidium parasiticum and the amoeba Capsaspora owczarzaki, and two members of Amoebozoa, Acanthamoeba castellanii and Mastigamoeba balamuthi. We find that homologs of genes involved in metazoan multicellularity exist in several of these unicellular organisms, including one encoding a membrane-associated guanylate kinase (MAGI) in Capsaspora. In Metazoa, MAGI regulates tight junctions involved in cell-cell communication. By phylogenomic analyses of genes encoded in nuclear and mitochondrial genomes we show that the choanoflagellates are the closest relatives of the Metazoa, followed by the Capsaspora and Icthyosporea lineages, although the branching order between the latter two groups remains unclear. Understanding the function of ‘metazoan-specific’ proteins we have identified in these protists will clarify the evolutionary steps that led to the emergence of the Metazoa.

Key Words: multicellularity • Metazoa • phylogenomics • Opisthokonts • MAGI


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