Chelsea L. Murphy, R. Yang, T. Decker, C. Cavalliere, V. Andreev, N. Bircher, J.Cornell, R. Dohmen, C. J. Pratt, A. Grinnell, J. Higgs, C. Jett, E. Gillett, R. Khadka, Sergio E. Mares, C. Meili, J. Liu, H. Mukhtar, Mostafa S. Elshahed, Noha H. Youssef
Environmental Microbiology 2021
Detailed analysis of 13 distinct pathways/processes crucial to predation and cellular differentiation revealed severely curtailed machineries, with the notable absence of homologs for key transcription factors, outer membrane exchange receptor (TraA), and the majority of sporulation-specific and A-motility-specific genes. We propose that predation and cellular differentiation represent a niche adaptation strategy that evolved circa 500 million years ago (Mya) in response to the rise of soil as a distinct habitat on Earth.