Having gone through the steps to build a phylogeny of the most common lichen photobiont, Trebouxia in my last post, I will now go on to discussing the host association patterns that it reveals. Here is the Trebouxia ITS tree generated previously:
Trebouxia ITS phylogeny. Major clades are differentilly coloured and named according to authentic strains
I’ve coloured all of the taxa within clades according to the colours of the named strains and I’ve assigned unique colours to each clade that does not contain named strains. I have not attempted to break up T. jamesii or T. impressa into sub-clades, though doing so would probably be justified. This will be a topic for a future post. I should also point out that T. jamesii is referred to as T. simplex is some papers.
In contrast to Nostoc photobionts where the fasta headers were consistently labeled with the host information, these sequences are …not. I used a bioperl wrapper to NCBI’s Eutils interface to download genbank format sequences and parsed them to extract host association information from the “host”, “note” and “isolation source” annotions. I also extracted information about the author of each sequence and where it was published while I was at it: Continue reading
