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During the first half of the twentieth century, many scientists considered viruses the smallest living entities and primitive life forms somehow placed between the inert world and highly evolved cells. The development of molecular biology in the second half of the century showed that viruses are strict molecular parasites of cells, putting an end to previous virocentric debates that gave viruses a...
The initiation factor 5A (IF-5A) of archaea and eukaryotes undergoes an unusual post-translational modification consisting of the transformation of a specific conserved lysine residue into the amino acid hypusine. This occurs in a two-step reaction catalysed by the enzymes deoxyhypusine synthase (DHS) and deoxyhypusine hydroxylase. Bacteria do not have IF-5A but only a very distant homologue, the...
Previous work on the evolution of the phosphofructokinase (PFK) has shown that this key regulatory enzyme of glycolysis has undergone an intricate evolutionary history. Here, we have used a comprehensive data set to address the taxonomic distribution of the different types of PFK (ATP-dependent and PPi-dependent ones) and to estimate the frequency of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events. Numerous...
Lateral gene transfers are frequent among prokaryotes, although their detection remains difficult. If all genes are equally affected, this questions the very existence of an organismal phylogeny. The complexity hypothesis postulates the existence of a core of genes (those involved in numerous interactions) that are unaffected by transfers. To test the hypothesis, we studied all the proteins involved...
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