EVOLUTION OF TRANSLATIONAL ELONGATION-FACTOR (EF) SEQUENCES - RELIABILITY OF GLOBAL PHYLOGENIES INFERRED FROM EF-1-ALPHA(TU) AND EF-2(G) PROTEINS

The EF-2 coding genes of the Archaea Pyrococcus woesei and Desulfurococcus mobilis were cloned and sequenced. Global phylogenies were inferred by alternative tree-making methods from available EF-2(G) sequence data and contrasted with phylogenies constructed from the more conserved but shorter EF-1alpha(Tu) sequences. Both the monophyly (sensu Hennig) of Archaea and their subdivision into the kingdoms Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota are consistently inferred by analysis of EF-2(G) sequences, usually at a high bootstrap confidence level. In contrast, EF-1alpha(Tu) phylogenies tend to be inconsistent with one another and show low boot-strap confidence levels. While evolutionary distance and DNA maximum parsimony analyses of EF-1alpha(Tu) sequences do show archaeal monophyly, protein parsimony and DNA maximum-likelihood analyses of these data do not. In no case, however, do any of the tree topologies inferred from EF-1alpha(Tu) sequence analyses receive significant bootstrap support.