Evolutionary relationships between "Q-type" photosynthetic reaction centres: hypothesis-testing using parsimony

Hypotheses concerning the evolutionary relationships between "Q-type" photosynthetic reaction centres are tested using amino acid parsimony analysis of subunit sequences and an alignment based on dot matrix comparisons. Strong evidence is found for independent gene duplications having produced the L and M subunits of the photosynthetic purple bacterial reaction centre and D1 and D2 of Photosystem-II. Much support is also found for the L and M subunits of the green filamentous bacterium Chloroflexus aurantiacus arising from the same gene duplication as the purple bacterial subunits, suggesting there was an ancestral bacterial heterodimeric reaction centre. These conclusions caution against over-extrapolation from the purple bacterial reaction centre to Photosystem-II, and suggest that the latter is more ancient than previously supposed.