Gene transfers can date the tree of life - Archive ouverte HAL Access content directly
Journal Articles Nature Ecology & Evolution Year : 2018

Gene transfers can date the tree of life

Abstract

Biodiversity has always been predominantly microbial, and the scarcity of fossils from bacteria, archaea and microbial eukaryotes has prevented a comprehensive dating of the tree of life. Here, we show that patterns of lateral gene transfer deduced from an analysis of modern genomes encode a novel and abundant source of information about the temporal coexistence of lineages throughout the history of life. We use state-of-the-art species tree-aware phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the history of thousands of gene families and demonstrate that dates implied by gene transfers are consistent with estimates from relaxed molecular clocks in Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. We present the order of speciations according to lateral gene transfer data calibrated to geological time for three datasets comprising 40 genomes for Cyanobacteria, 60 genomes for Archaea and 60 genomes for Fungi. An inspection of discrepancies between transfers and clocks and a comparison with mammalian fossils show that gene transfer in microbes is potentially as informative for dating the tree of life as the geological record in macroorganisms.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
193813.1.full (1).pdf (2.99 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01913812 , version 1 (14-11-2018)

Identifiers

Cite

Adrián Davín, Eric Tannier, Tom A Williams, Bastien Boussau, Vincent Daubin, et al.. Gene transfers can date the tree of life. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018, 2 (5), pp.904-909. ⟨10.1038/s41559-018-0525-3⟩. ⟨hal-01913812⟩
227 View
29 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn More