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Monitoring Intraspecies Competition in a Bacterial Cell Population by Cocultivation of Fluorescently Labelled Strains
Published on: January 18, 2014
GroEL and the maintenance of bacterial endosymbiosis
Mario Ali Fares1, Andrés Moya, Eladio Barrio
1Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Laboratory, Biology Department, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.
Abstract:
Many eukaryotic organisms have symbiotic associations with obligate intracellular bacteria. The clonal transmission of endosymbionts between host generations should lead to the irreversible fixation of slightly deleterious mutations in their non-recombinant genome by genetic drift. However, the stability of endosymbiosis indicates that some mechanism is involved in the amelioration of the effects of these mutations. We propose that the chaperone GroEL was involved in the acquisition of an endosymbiotic lifestyle not only by means of its over-production, as proposed by Moran, but also by its adaptive evolution mediated by positive selection to improve the interaction with the unstable endosymbiont proteome.
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