Tuesday, November 10, 2015

A cyanobacterium with an anoxygenic Type II reaction center from purple bacteria? (Contamination)

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With the surge of genome sequences it is crazy what you can find. As I was doing a few BLASTs searching for new photosynthetic reaction cent...
Friday, October 30, 2015

Horizontal gene transfer from gammaproteobacteria to cyanobacteria and others

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It seems to me that Gammaproteobacteria can transfer a lot of their photosynthesis related genes to other bacteria. Recent phylogenetic st...
Thursday, October 29, 2015

Evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis - New D1 sequences

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Early this year I published a study on the evolution of all D1 proteins ( Cardona et al., 2015 ). Interestingly, there are a number of sequ...
Thursday, July 30, 2015

Is a 'tree of life' also a 'tree of death'?

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Imagine that you could build an evolutionary tree that included every single organism that has ever existed since the origin of life: inclu...
Monday, July 20, 2015

Phototrophy in ancient Actinobacteria

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The evolution of photosynthesis is complex, but not intractable. Views on the origin of photosynthesis can be summarized like this: Photo...
Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Contamination of genome projects with DNA from other organisms

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I was blasting a protein named PsbO, also known as the 'manganese stabilizing protein' of Photosystem II. This is a protein found ...
Monday, April 13, 2015

The unusual D1 protein of Microcystis auriginosa TAIHU98

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My coworkers and I recently published an article studying the p hylogeny of all D1 subunits found in cyanobacteria . That study gave us som...