A Phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids

Cyanobacteria are a morphologically diverse phylum, with their first occurrence dating from the Precambrian. Oxygenic photosynthesis appeared in this group during the same geological period. Several publications have established, without any doubt, that plastids (both primary and complex) form a monophyletic ensemble emerging from Cyanobacteria. However, the exact position of plastids within Cyanobacteria is still uncertain, with several recent papers leading to very different hypotheses. Here we present a phylogenomic analysis of the origin of plastids. Our study takes advantage of all the available genomes and thus represents the best taxonomic sampling seen so far: 140 genomes of Cyanobacteria, 101 genomes of plastids and 27 outgroups taken in Melainabacteria and Chloroflexi. It results in an analysis using state-of-the-art methods (e.g., orthology assessment using USEARCH and OrthoMCL, phylogenetic inference using CAT and CAT-GTR models) based on more than 160 protein alignments totalizing over 20,000 unambiguously aligned amino acids. To confirm our results, we performed gene jackknife inferences and gene reconciliation analyses on the same dataset. We expect that out approach accounts for potential phylogenetic artefacts due to changes in the evolutionary process having occurred when the guest cyanobacterium became an endosymbiont and eventually a plastid. Meanwhile, we improve the phylogeny of Cyanobacteria per se, notably because of the presence of Melainabacteria in our dataset.