Journal
CURRENT BIOLOGY
Volume 18, Issue 21, Pages 1675-1679Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.09.030
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R21 AI52792, R21 AI064118, AI50113]
- NSF [0135272]
- Canadian Institutes for Health Research [MOP-84265]
- Div Of Molecular and Cellular Bioscience
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0135272] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Microsporidia are obligate, intracellular eukaryotic pathogens that infect animal cells, including humans [1]. Previous studies suggested microsporidia share a common ancestor with fungi [2-7]. However, the exact nature of this phylogenetic relationship is unclear because of unusual features of microsporidial genomes, which are compact with fewer and highly divergent genes [8]. As a consequence, it is unclear whether microsporidia evolved from a specific fungal lineage, or whether microsporidia are a sister group to all fungi. Here, we present evidence addressing this controversial question that is independent of sequence-based phylogenetic reconstruction, but rather based on genome structure. In the zygomycete basal fungal lineage, the sex locus is a syntenic gene cluster governing sexual reproduction in which a high mobility group (HMG) transcription-factor gene is flanked by triosephosphate transporter (TPT) and RNA helicase genes [9]. Strikingly, microsporidian genomes harbor a sex-related locus with the same genes in the same order. Genome-wide synteny analysis reveals multiple other loci conserved between microsporidia and zygomycetes to the exclusion of all other fungal lineages with sequenced genomes. These findings support the hypothesis that microsporidia are true fungi that descended from a zygomycete ancestor and suggest microsporidia may have an extant sexual cycle.
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