BMC Evolutionary Biology

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Open Access Highly Access Research article

Identification of multiple independent horizontal gene transfers into poxviruses using a comparative genomics approach

Kirsten A Bratke and Aoife McLysaght*

BMC Evolutionary Biology 2008, 8:67 doi:10.1186/1471-2148-8-67

Photolyase phylogeny

David Evans   (2008-03-11 11:06)  University of Alberta email

Interesting paper. Our earlier analysis of the photolyase (PL) phylogeny VERY strongly suggested all poxvirus PL's are monophyletic, with a common origin that predates the divergence of their disparate hosts. If horizontal transfer were operational one might predict entomopoxvirus PL's to more closely resemble insect PL's and chordopoxvirus PL's to resemble chordate PL's. That's not seen.

Curious problem.

The reference is Bennett et al. (2003) Virology 315: 10-19.

David Evans

Competing interests

None.

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