An updated phylogeny of the Alphaproteobacteria reveals that the Rickettsiales and Holosporales have independent origins

Abstract

The Alphaproteobacteria is an extraordinarily diverse and ancient group of bacteria. Previous attempts to infer its deep phylogeny have been plagued with methodological artefacts. To overcome this, we analyzed a dataset of 200 single-copy and conserved genes and employed diverse strategies to reduce compositional artefacts. Such strategies include using novel dataset-specific profile mixture models and recoding schemes, and removing sites, genes and taxa that are compositionally biased. We show that the Rickettsiales and Holosporales (both groups of intracellular parasites of eukaryotes) are not sisters to each other, but instead, the Holosporales has a derived position within the Rhodospirillales. Furthermore, we find that the Rhodospirillales might be paraphyletic and that the Geminicoccaceae could be sister to all ancestrally free-living alphaproteobacteria. Our robust phylogeny will serve as a framework for future studies that aim to place mitochondria, and novel environmental diversity, within the Alphaproteobacteria.