Phylogenomic coupling of F1 chemosensory and archaellum systems across archaea and monoderm bacteria
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Archaellum-associated motility has been viewed as solely archaeal, yet new findings in Chloroflexota prompt a broader perspective. By analysing a curated ∼22,000 NCBI reference genomes alongside 2,397 archaeal and 226 archaellum-encoding Chloroflexota genomes, this study systematically characterises the co-distribution of archaellum loci with chemosensory system (CSS) classes. Maximum-likelihood phylogeny of 3,727 F1-type CheA proteins reveals three major clades, with Clade 1 comprising ∼80% monoderm representation, uniting archaeal and monoderm bacterial lineages in a shared evolutionary grouping. Overall, this work shows that not only archaeal-type motility, but also F1-CSS based sensing system, might have been gained from Archaea to Chloroflexota via horizontal gene transfer and both systems shared an evolutionary trajectory altogether.
