An updated phylogeny of the Alphaproteobacteria reveals that the parasitic Rickettsiales and Holosporales have independent origins

• DOI: 10.7554/elife.42535
• Publication Date: 2019-02-21T13:00:52Z
• Authors: Sergio A Muñoz-Gómez; Sebastian Hess; Gertraud Burger; B Franz Lang; Edward Susko; Claudio H Slamovits; Andrew J Roger
• Keywords: Alphaproteobacteria

The Alphaproteobacteria is an extraordinarily diverse and ancient group of bacteria. Previous attempts to infer its deep phylogeny have been plagued with methodological artefacts. To overcome this, we analyzed a dataset 200 single-copy conserved genes employed strategies reduce compositional Such include using novel dataset-specific profile mixture models recoding schemes, removing sites, taxa that are compositionally biased. We show the Rickettsiales Holosporales (both groups intracellular parasites eukaryotes) not sisters each other, but instead, has derived position within Rhodospirillales. A synthesis our results also leads updated proposal for higher-level taxonomy Alphaproteobacteria. Our robust consensus will serve as framework future studies aim place mitochondria, environmental diversity,