The origins of eukaryotic-like proteins in Legionella pneumophila

Neisseria gonorrhoeaeand humans perform an evolutionary LINE dance

“…Other examples of eukaryote-to-bacteria HGT events have been described in the literature; [7][8][9] however, in these cases the degree of identity between donor and recipient sequences is considerably lower that what we have observed with nL1. In fact, the degree of identity between nL1 and the corresponding human sequence may be problematic in terms of identifying other similar HGT events since they may simply be regarded as the result of sequencing contamination.…”

Genome Dynamics in Legionella: The Basis of Versatility and Adaptation to Intracellular Replication

“…Legionella possesses all necessary factors for acquiring genes laterally as these bacteria are naturally competent and a complete recombination machinery is present, thus it is conceivable that eukaryotic-like proteins have been acquired by HGT. To analyze this question, different phylogenetic analyses of some of these eukaryotic-like proteins have been performed revealing a clustering of the Legionella eukaryotic-like proteins with eukaryotic sequences, further supporting the hypothesis that these were acquired by HGT from eukaryotic organisms like amoeba (de Felipe et al 2005;Nora et al 2009;Lurie-Weinberger et al 2010;Gomez-Valero et al 2011a). An example is the enzyme arylamine N-acetyltransferase (NAT) encoded by lpp2516 in strain Paris.…”

Legionella oakridgensis ATCC 33761 genome sequence and phenotypic characterization reveals its replication capacity in amoebae

“…However, the overall amount of eukaryote-like proteins is comparable to the amount identified in L. longbeachae (Cazalet et al, 2010;Kozak et al, 2010). All the mentioned proteins are known to be involved in the pathogen-host interplay during the intracellular replication of L. pneumophila Hubber et al, 2010;Lurie-Weinberger et al, 2010;Gomez-Valero et al, 2011).…”