Abstract
With the exception of the methanogenic archaea Methanococcus jannaschii and Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum ΔH, all organisms surveyed contain orthologs of Escherichia coli cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase (CysRS). The characterization of CysRS-encoding (cysS) genes and the demonstration of their ability to complement an E. coli cysS(ts) mutant reveal that Methanococcus maripaludis and Methanosarcina barkeri, two other methanogenic archaea, possess canonical CysRS proteins. A molecular phylogeny inferred from 40 CysRS sequences indicates that the CysRS of M. maripaludis and Methanosarcina spp. are specific relatives of the CysRS of Pyrococcus spp. and Chlamydia, respectively. This result suggests that the CysRS gene was acquired by lateral gene transfer in at least one euryarchaeotic lineage. Copyright (C) 1999 Federation of European Biochemical Societies.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 302-306 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | FEBS Letters |
Volume | 462 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 3 1999 |
Externally published | Yes |
Funding
We thank S. Fitz-Gibbon, T. Hartsch, D. Oesterhelt, A. Ruepp and S. Schuster for sharing unpublished sequence data. M.K. was a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. D.E.G. was supported by an NIH Cellular and Molecular Biology Training grant. This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (to D.S.) and the U.S. Department of Energy (to D.S. and W.B.W.).
Keywords
- Aminoacyl-tRNA
- Cysteinyl-tRNA synthetase