Abstract

Land plants and algae from a supergroup, the Archaeplastida, believed to be monophyletic. We report the results of an analysis of the phylogeny of putative globins in the currently available genomes to bacterial and other eukaryote hemoglobins (Hbs). Archaeplastida genomes have 3/3 and 2/2 Hbs in Ricinus communis. Bayesian analysis shows that plant 3/3 Hbs are related to vertebrate neuroglobins and bacterial flavohemoglobins (FHbs). We sought to define the bacterial groups, whose ancestors shared the precursors of Archaeplastida Hbs, via Bayesian and neighbor-joining analyses based on COBALT alignment of representative sets of bacterial 3/3 FHb-like globins and group 1 and 2 2/2 Hbs with the corresponding Archaeplastida Hbs. The results suggest that the Archaeplastida 3/3 and group 1 2/2 Hbs could have originated from the horizontal gene transfers (HGTs) that accompanied the two generally accepted endosymbioses of a proteobacterium and a cyanobacterium with a eukaryote ancestor. In contrast, the origin of the group 2 2/2 unexpectedly appears to involve HGT from a bacterium ancestral to Chloroflexi, Deinococcales, Bacilli, and Actinomycetes. Furthermore, although intron positions and phases are mostly conserved among the land plant 3/3 and 2/2 globin genes, introns are absent in the algal 3/3 genes and intron positions and phases are highly variable in their 2/2 genes. Thus, introns are irrelevant to globin evolution in Archaeplastida.