TY - JOUR TI - An updated phylogeny of the Alphaproteobacteria reveals that the parasitic Rickettsiales and Holosporales have independent origins AU - Muñoz-Gómez, Sergio A AU - Hess, Sebastian AU - Burger, Gertraud AU - Lang, B Franz AU - Susko, Edward AU - Slamovits, Claudio H AU - Roger, Andrew J A2 - Rokas, Antonis A2 - Wittkopp, Patricia J A2 - Irisarri, Iker VL - 8 PY - 2019 DA - 2019/02/21 SP - e42535 C1 - eLife 2019;8:e42535 DO - 10.7554/eLife.42535 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42535 AB - 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. A synthesis of our results also leads to an updated proposal for the higher-level taxonomy of the Alphaproteobacteria. Our robust consensus phylogeny will serve as a framework for future studies that aim to place mitochondria, and novel environmental diversity, within the Alphaproteobacteria. KW - Holosporales KW - Holosporaceae KW - mitochondria KW - Rhodospirillales KW - Azospirillaceae KW - Rhodovibriaceae KW - Finniella inopinata KW - Stachyamoba KW - Peranema JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -