RESEARCH ARTICLE


The Common Ancestor of Deinococcus Species was Rod-Shaped



Yusuke Morita, Hiromi Nishida*
Department of Biotechnology, Toyama Prefectural University, 5180 Kurokawa, Imizu, Toyama 939-0398, Japan


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Creative Commons License
© 2018 Morita and Nishida.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to the author at the Department of Biotechnology, Toyama Prefectural University, 5180 Kurokawa, Imizu, Toyama 939-0398, Japan; Tel: +81 766 56 7500; E-mail: hnishida@pu-toyama.ac.jp


Abstract

Background:

The genus Deinococcus consists of species in rod-shape (Bacilli) and spherical shape (Cocci).

Objective:

In this study, we aimed to determine whether the common ancestor of Deinococcus species was rod-shaped or spherical.

Methods:

We compared the homologs of the proteins related to the rod-shape in bacteria (MreB, MreC, MreD, MrdA, RodA, and RodZ) in various Deinococcus species and Thermus thermophilus.

Results:

The phylogenetic trees based on each protein and the homologs reflected the evolutionary relationships of the species, indicating that the Horizontal transfer of the genes did not occur during the Deinococcus evolution.

Conclusion:

The ancestor of the genus Deinococcus was rod-shaped, and the spherical forms appeared when the rod-shaped formation system was lost during evolution and diversification within the genus.

Keywords: Deinococcus, Bacilli, Cocci, Thermus thermophilus, Phylogenetic trees, Evolution.