The rapidly growing database of completely sequenced genomes of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and viruses (several thousand genomes already available and many more in progress) creates both new opportunities and new challenges for genome research. Over the last year, we performed several studies that took advantage of the genomic information to establish fundamental principles of genome evolution. Genomes of bacteria and archaea (collectively, prokaryotes) appear to exist in incessant flux, expanding via horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and gene duplication, and contracting via gene loss. However, the actual rates of genome dynamics and relative contributions of different types of events across the diversity of prokaryotes are largely unknown, as are the sizes of microbial supergenomes, i.e. pools of genes that are accessible to the given microbial species. We performed a comprehensive analysis of the genome dynamics in 35 groups (34 bacterial and one archaeal) of closely related microbial genomes using a phylogenetic birth-and-death maximum likelihood model to quantify the rates of gene family gain and loss, as well as expansion and reduction. The results show that loss of gene families dominates the evolution of prokaryotes, occurring at approximately three times the rate of gain. The rates of gene family expansion and reduction are typically 7 and 20 times less than the gain and loss rates, respectively. Thus, the prevailing mode of evolution in bacteria and archaea is genome contraction that is partially compensated by the gain of new gene families via horizontal gene transfer. However, the rates of gene family gain, loss, expansion and reduction vary within wide ranges, with the most stable genomes showing rates about 25 times lower than the most dynamic genomes. For many groups, the supergenome estimated from the fraction of repetitive gene family gains includes about 10 fold more gene families than the typical genome in the group although some groups appear to have vast, """"""""open"""""""" supergenomes.Reconstruction of evolution in groups of closely related bacteria and archaea reveals extremely rapid and highly variable flux of genes in evolving microbial genomes, demonstrates that extensive gene loss and horizontal gene transfer leading to innovation are the two dominant evolutionary processes, and yields robust estimates of the supergenome size. Diverse transposable elements are abundant in genomes of cellular organisms from all three domains of life. Although transposons are often regarded as junk DNA, a growing body of evidence indicates that they are behind some of the major evolutionary innovations. With the growth in the number and diversity of sequenced genomes, previously unnoticed mobile elements continue to be discovered. We discovered a new superfamily of archaeal and bacterial mobile elements which we denote casposons because they encode Cas1 endonuclease, a key enzyme of the CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity systems of archaea and bacteria. The casposons share several features with self-synthesizing eukaryotic DNA transposons of the Polinton/Maverick class, including terminal inverted repeats and genes for B family DNA polymerases. However, unlike any other known mobile elements, the casposons are predicted to rely on Cas1 for integration and excision, via a mechanism similar to the integration of new spacers into CRISPR loci. We identify three distinct families of casposons that differ in their gene repertoires and evolutionary provenance of the DNA polymerases. Deep branching of the casposon-encoded endonuclease in the Cas1 phylogeny suggests that casposons played a pivotal role in the emergence of CRISPR-Cas immunity. The casposons are a novel superfamily of mobile elements, the first family of putative self-synthesizing transposons discovered in prokaryotes. The likely contribution of capsosons to the evolution of CRISPR-Cas parallels the involvement of the RAG1 transposase in vertebrate immunoglobulin gene rearrangement, suggesting that recruitment of endonucleases from mobile elements as ready-made tools for genome manipulation is a general route of evolution of adaptive immunity. Gene evolution is traditionally considered within the framework of the molecular clock (MC) model whereby each gene is characterized by an approximately constant rate of evolution. Recent comparative analysis of numerous phylogenies of prokaryotic genes has shown that a different model of evolution, denoted the Universal PaceMaker (UPM), which postulates conservation of relative, rather than absolute evolutionary rates, yields a better fit to the phylogenetic data. Here, we show that the UPM model is a better fit than the MC for genome wide sets of phylogenetic trees from six species of Drosophila and nine species of yeast, with extremely high statistical significance. Unlike the prokaryotic phylogenies that include distant organisms and multiple horizontal gene transfers, these are simple data sets that cover groups of closely related organisms and consist of gene trees with the same topology as the species tree. The results indicate that both lineage-specific and gene-specific rates are important in genome evolution but the lineage-specific contribution is greater. Similar to the MC, the gene evolution rates under the UPM are strongly overdispersed, approximately 2-fold compared with the expectation from sampling error alone. However, we show that neither Drosophila nor yeast genes form distinct clusters in the tree space. Thus, the gene-specific deviations from the UPM, although substantial, are uncorrelated and most likely depend on selective factors that are largely unique to individual genes. Thus, the UPM appears to be a key feature of genome evolution across the history of cellular life. Taken together, these studies advance the existing understanding of the genome evolution in diverse life forms, in particular viruses and mobile elements, and provide new insights into general principles of genome evolution.
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