Phylogeny of the "Forgotten" Cellular Slime Mold, Fonticula alba, Reveals a Key Evolutionary Branch within Opisthokonta
Open Access
- 19 August 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Molecular Biology and Evolution
- Vol. 26 (12), 2699-2709
- https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msp185
Abstract
The shared ancestry between Fungi and animals has been unequivocally demonstrated by abundant molecular and morphological data for well over a decade. Along with the animals and Fungi, multiple protists have been placed in the supergroup Opisthokonta making it exceptionally diverse. In an effort to place the cellular slime mold Fonticula alba, an amoeboid protist with aggregative, multicellular fruiting, we sequenced five nuclear encoded genes; small subunit ribosomal RNA, actin, beta-tubulin, elongation factor 1-alpha, and the cytosolic isoform of heat shock protein 70 for phylogenetic analyses. Molecular trees demonstrate that Fonticula is an opisthokont that branches sister to filose amoebae in the genus Nuclearia. Fonticula plus Nuclearia are sister to Fungi. We propose a new name for this well-supported clade, Nucletmycea, incorporating Nuclearia, Fonticula, and Fungi. Fonticula represents the first example of a cellular slime mold morphology within Opisthokonta. Thus, there are four types of multicellularity in the supergroup—animal, fungal, colonial, and now aggregative. Our data indicate that multicellularity in Fonticula evolved independent of that found in the fungal and animal radiations. With the rapidly expanding sequence and genomic data becoming available from many opisthokont lineages, Fonticula may be fundamental to understanding opisthokont evolution as well as any possible commonalities involved with the evolution of multicellularity.Keywords
This publication has 40 references indexed in Scilit:
- Molecular phylogeny of choanoflagellates, the sister group to MetazoaProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008
- The New Higher Level Classification of Eukaryotes with Emphasis on the Taxonomy of ProtistsThe Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology, 2005
- Fungal evolution: the case of the vanishing mitochondrionCurrent Opinion in Microbiology, 2005
- ProtTest: selection of best-fit models of protein evolutionBioinformatics, 2005
- Parallel Metropolis coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian phylogenetic inferenceBioinformatics, 2004
- Phylogeny of Lobose Amoebae Based on Actin and Small-Subunit Ribosomal RNA GenesMolecular Biology and Evolution, 2003
- Phylogeny of Choanozoa, Apusozoa, and Other Protozoa and Early Eukaryote MegaevolutionJournal of Molecular Evolution, 2003
- Origin and evolution of the slime molds (Mycetozoa)Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1997
- Animals and fungi are each other's closest relatives: congruent evidence from multiple proteins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1993
- Role of Golgi Apparatus in Sorogenesis by the Cellular Slime Mold Fonticula albaScience, 1981