Walking from E. coli to B. subtilis, one ribonuclease at a time

Most bacterial ribonucleases (RNases) known to date have been identified in either Escherichia coli or Bacillus subtilis. These two organisms lie on opposite poles of the phylogenetic spectrum, separated by 1-3 billion years of evolution. As a result, the RNA maturation and degradation machineries of these two organisms have little overlap, with each having a distinct set of RNases in addition to a core set of enzymes that is highly conserved across the bacterial spectrum. In this paper, we describe what the functions performed by major RNases in these two bacteria, and how the evolutionary space between them can be described by two opposing gradients of enzymes that fade out and fade in, respectively, as one walks across the phylogenetic tree from E. coli to B. subtilis.