Section: New Results

The fossil record of microbes augmented by an order of magnitude

Participants: Eric Tannier

Biodiversity has always been predominantly microbial and the scarcity of fossils from bacteria, archaea and microbial eukaryotes has prevented a comprehensive dating of the tree of life. We have shown that patterns of lateral gene transfer deduced from the analysis of modern genomes encode a novel and abundant source of information about the temporal coexistence of lineages throughout the history of life. We constructed and used new phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the history of thousands of gene families and demonstrate that dates implied by gene transfers are consistent with estimates from relaxed molecular clocks in bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. An inspection of discrepancies between transfers and clocks and a comparison with mammal fossils show that gene transfer in microbes is potentially as informative for dating the tree of life as the geological record in macroorganisms.

Main publications: [30]