Early Evolution of the Eukaryotic Ca2+ Signaling Machinery: Conservation of the CatSper Channel Complex

Calcium signaling is one of the most extensively employed signal transduction mechanisms in life. As life evolved into increasingly complex organisms, Ca2+ acquired more extensive and varied functions. Here, we compare genes encoding proteins that govern Ca2+ entry and exit across cells or organelles within organisms of early eukaryotic evolution into fungi, plants, and animals. Recent phylogenomics analyses reveal a complex Ca2+ signaling machinery in the apusozoan protist Thecamonas trahens, a putative unicellular progenitor of Opisthokonta. We compare T. trahens Ca2+ signaling to that in a marine bikont protist, Aurantiochytrium limacinum, and demonstrate the conservation of key Ca2+ signaling molecules in the basally diverging alga Cyanophora paradoxa. Particularly, our findings reveal the conservation of the CatSper channel complex in Au. limacinum and C. paradoxa, suggesting that the CatSper complex likely originated from an ancestral Ca2+ signaling machinery at the root of early eukaryotic evolution prior to the unikont/bikont split.