Gergely Szöllősi, a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Science of the ELKH Centre for Ecological Research (CER) and the MTA-ELTE Momentum Evolutionary Genomics Research Group was involved in computational evolutionary biology research that gives us a much better understanding of the parallel development of complex multicellularity between fungi and animals. The paper summarizing the results was published by the world’s leading scientific journal, Nature. Although there are seemingly vast differences between animals and fungi, and even though fungi much more strongly resemble plants than animals in the minds of many, phylogenetic results show that the two groups of organisms are much closer to each other than either of them are to plants.
According to the introduction to the recently published study, perhaps the biggest surprise of early molecular phylogenetic research was how closely multicellular animals and fungi are actually related to each other, despite their astonishing differences in morphology, physiology and other respects. The lead author of the article is Eduard Ocaña-Pallarès, who at the time of the research was working as a postdoctoral researcher in the group Szöllősi established, with support from CER, within ELTE’s Department of Biological Physics.
“We deal with computational evolutionary biology; specifically what we do is reconstruct the history of genes along the species tree,” says Szöllősi. “Eduard Ocaña-Pallarès came here from Barcelona, where he sequenced the genomes of four single-celled organisms. He became involved in this research, which represents a very important milestone in the evolution of phylogeny, and we were able to use his data to draw more accurate gene trees than before.”
Due to their genetic similarities, multicellular animals and fungi are now grouped into a large related “supergroup” called the Opisthokonta. At the same time, little is known about how the evolution of animals and fungi took place as they diverged from the common ancestor of this group, resulting in the dramatic differences we see today. The recently published research provides some insight into this stage of phylogenetic development by mapping the genetic evolutionary trajectories of both animals and fungi. The results suggest that multicellular animals appeared only after their ancestors gradually “collected” the genes necessary for effective multicellularity. This process had therefore already started in the single-celled ancestor of multicellular animals and was accompanied by an increase in the number of genes.