reductive genome evolution from the mother of rickettsia还原基因组进化的立克次氏体的母亲.pdfVIP

Reductive Genome Evolution from the Mother of Rickettsia 1[* 1[ 2 ´ 1 1 2 Guillaume Blanc , Hiroyuki Ogata , Catherine Robert , Stephane Audic , Karsten Suhre , Guy Vestris , Jean-Michel 1 2* Claverie , Didier Raoult ´ 1 Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory, Institut de Biologie Structurale et Microbiologie, Parc Scientifique de Luminy, Marseille, France, 2 Unite des Rickettsies, ´ ´ Faculte de Medecine, Marseille, France The Rickettsia genus is a group of obligate intracellular a-proteobacteria representing a paradigm of reductive evolution. Here, we investigate the evolutionary processes that shaped the genomes of the genus. The reconstruction of ancestral genomes indicates that their last common ancestor contained more genes, but already possessed most traits associated with cellular parasitism. The differences in gene repertoires across modern Rickettsia are mainly the result of differential gene losses from the ancestor. We demonstrate using computer simulation that the propensity of loss was variable across genes during this process. We also analyzed the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous changes (Ka/Ks) calculated as an average over large sets of genes to assay the strength of selection acting on the genomes of Rickettsia, Anaplasmataceae, and free-living c-proteobacteria. As a general trend, Ka/Ks were found to decrease with increasing divergence between genomes. The high Ka/Ks for closely related genomes are probably due to a lag in the removal of slightly deleterious nonsynonymous mutations by natural select