Long-Lasting Gene Conversion Shapes the Convergent Evolution of the Critical Methanogenesis Genes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Methanogenesis and its key small-molecule methyltransferase Mtr complex are poorly understood despite their pivotal role in Earth's global carbon cycle. Mtr complex is encoded by a conserved mtrEDCBAFGH operon in most methanogens. Here we report that two discrete lineages, Methanococcales and Methanomicrobiales, have a noncanonical mtr operon carrying two copies of mtrA resulting from an ancient duplication. Compared to mtrA-1, mtrA-2 acquires a distinct transmembrane domain through domain shuffling and gene fusion. However, the nontransmembrane domains (MtrA domain) of mtrA-1 and mtrA-2 are homogenized by gene conversion events lasting throughout the long history of these extant methanogens (over 2410 million years). Furthermore, we identified a possible recruitment of ancient nonmethanogenic methyltransferase genes to establish the methanogenesis pathway. These results not only provide novel evolutionary insight into the methanogenesis pathway and methyltransferase superfamily but also suggest an unanticipated long-lasting effect of gene conversion on gene evolution in a convergent pattern.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".