Journal
GENE
Volume 402, Issue 1-2, Pages 35-39Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.gene.2007.07.023
Keywords
endosymbiotic transfer; genome evolution; phylogenetic networks
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Euglena gracilis has a chimeric gene collection in which some genes were inherited from its heterotrophic host and others were acquired from a photoautotrophic endosymbiont during secondary endosymbiosis. The evolutionary reconstruction of such a hybrid genome poses a challenge for standard phylogenetic tools that produce bifurcating trees because genome evolution by endosymbiotic gene transfer is a non tree-like process. We sequenced 2770 ESTs from E. gracilis, of which 841 have homologues in a sample of other eukaryotes. Most of these homologues are found in all of the eukaryotes in our sample, but 117 of them are specific to photoautotrophic eukaryotes. A phylogenetic tree fails to account for this observation but the distribution of homologues and a phylogenetic network clearly show the common origin of E. gracilis from both kinetoplastid and photoautotrophic ancestors. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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