SRA

Background: Recent phylogenomic analyses have revolutionized our view of eukaryote evolution by revealing unexpected relationships between and within the eukaryotic supergroups. However, for several groups of uncultivable protists, only the ribosomal RNA genes and a handful of proteins are available, often leading to unresolved evolutionary relationships. A striking example concerns the supergroup Rhizaria, which comprises several groups of uncultivable free-living protists such as radiolarians, foraminiferans and gromiids, as well as the parasitic plasmodiophorids and haplosporids. Thus far, the relationships within this supergroup have been inferred almost exclusively from rRNA, actin, and polyubiquitin genes, and remain poorly resolved. To address this, we have generated large Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) datasets for 5 species of Rhizaria belonging to 3 important groups: Acantharea (Astrolonche sp., Phyllostaurus sp.), Phytomyxea (Spongospora subterranea, Plasmodiophora brassicae) and Gromiida (Gromia sphaerica). Results: 167 genes were selected for phylogenetic analyses based on the representation of at least one rhizarian species for each gene. Concatenation of these genes produced a supermatrix composed of 37,588 amino acid positions, including 10 rhizarians, 9 stramenopiles, and 9 alveolates. Phylogenomic analyses of this large dataset revealed a strongly supported clade grouping Foraminifera and Acantharea. The position of this clade within Rhizaria was sensitive to the evolutionary model employed: Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian analyses using empirical model of evolution favored an early divergence, whereas the CAT model and ML analyses with fast-evolving sites removed suggested that the parasitic Phytomyxea could be the most ancestral group of Rhizaria. In contrast to what has been previously reported, our analyses also uncovered the presence of the rhizarian-specific polyubiquitin insertion in Acantharea. Finally, this work reveals another possible rhizarian signature in the 60S ribosomal protein L10a. Conclusions: Our study provides new insights into the evolution of Rhizaria based on phylogenomic analyses of ESTs from three groups of previously under-sampled protists. Since our method of transcriptome analysis using next-generation sequencing requires a very small amount of starting material, it can be utilized to gain further insight into the early evolution of eukaryotes by providing large amount of data for uncultivable free-living and parasitic protists.