Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 104, Issue 17, Pages 7116-7121Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0700266104
Keywords
bacterial evolution; biological complexity; gene duplication
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Funding
- NIGMS NIH HHS [R01 GM056120, R01 GM074738, GM 56120, GM 74738] Funding Source: Medline
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Elucidating the origins of complex biological structures has been one of the major challenges of evolutionary studies. The bacterial flagellum is a primary example of a complex apparatus whose origins and evolutionary history have proven difficult to reconstruct. The gene clusters encoding the components of the flagellum can include >50 genes, but these clusters vary greatly in their numbers and contents among bacterial phyla. To investigate how this diversity arose, we identified all homologs of all flagellar proteins encoded in the complete genome sequences of 41 flagellated species from 11 bacterial phyla. Based on the phylogenetic occurrence and histories of each of these proteins, we could distinguish an ancient core set of 24 structural genes that were present in the common ancestor to all Bacteria. Within a genome, many of these core genes show sequence similarity only to other flagellar core genes, indicating that they were derived from one another, and the relationships among these genes suggest the probable order in which the structural components of the bacterial flagellum arose. These results show that core components of the bacterial flagellum originated through the successive duplication and modification of a few, or perhaps even a single, precursor gene.
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