BMC Evolutionary Biology Volume 8

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Major role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of Fur across bacterial divisions

Morgan Price   (14 October 2008)  Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Santos and colleagues propose a scenario for the evolution of Fur within Actinobacteria in which duplication within lineages is the major mechanism. However, for most of their analyses, they considered only homologs within the Actinobacteria, which might cause them to miss horizontal gene transfer events. A preliminary analysis with the MicrobesOnline tree-browser suggests that some members of subgroups C and D were acquired from other bacterial divisions long after the divergence of the Actinobacteria. For example, see the tree-browser pages for a group C gene, FRAAL5117 from Frankia alni ACN14a:

http://www.microbesonline.org/cgi-bin/treeBrowse.cgi?locus=1881961&gtree1881961=COG.735.1&cluster=70&ngenes=50&show=species

and for a group D gene, SAV_3053 from Streptomyces avermitilis:

http://www.microbesonline.org/cgi-bin/treeBrowse.cgi?locus=226120&gtree226120=COG.735.1&cluster=70&ngenes=50&show=species

Both genes lack close homologs in other Actinobacteria (except for other organisms in the same genus) but have close homologs in bacteria from other phyla.

Competing interests

None declared

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