RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Ancestral Reconstruction of Gene Blocks using an Event-Based Method
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 212886
DO 10.1101/212886
A1 Huy N. Nguyen
A1 Ashish Jain
A1 Oliver Eulenstein
A1 Iddo Friedberg
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/01/212886.abstract
AB Motivation A fundamental attribute of life is complex systems: systems made of parts that together perform functions that a single component, or most subsets containing individual components, cannot. Examples of molecular complexity include protein structures such as the F1F0-ATPase, the ribosome, or the flagellar motor. Each one of these structures requires most or all of its components to function properly. Given the ubiquity of complex systems in the biosphere, understanding the evolution of complexity is central to biology. At the molecular level, operons are a classic example of a complex system. An operon's genes are co-transcribed under the control of a single promoter to a polycistronic mRNA molecule. The operon's gene products often form molecular complexes or metabolic pathways. With the large number of complete bacterial genomes available, we now have the opportunity to examine the evolution of operons and identify possible intermediate states.Results In this work, we used a maximum parsimony algorithm to reconstruct ancestral operon states, and show a simple vertical evolution model of how operons may evolve from the individual component genes. We offer the software as the Reconstruction of Ancestral Genomes Using Events or ROAGUE.Availability and implementation The software is available on https://github.com/nguyenngochuy91/Ancestral-Blocks-ReconstructionContact huyn{at}iastate.edu, idoerg{at}iastate.edu