PARENT SESSION
Plenary Lectures 5
Friday September 3rd, 2004 3:30 PM Room 210A

Insights into the Evolution of Genome Complexity from Photosynthesis -Pathways and Organisms. Jason Raymond^*,1, ¹ Genome Biology Division, Livermore, California, USA

ABSTRACT- The expansion and proliferation of functionally diverse protein families, driven mainly by duplication of chromosomal DNA, has been a central theme in the evolution and "complexification" of life. This talk will focus on the genetic events behind metabolic innovations that occurred largely during the Precambrian (3800 through 500 million years ago), as exemplified in particular by the ancient but evolutionarily linked pathways of photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation. These two processes were of pivotal importance to the early evolution of life and development of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles and, remarkably, primitive enzymatic components of each clearly co-evolved in early organisms. Widening in scope to the organismal level, variations on this theme have evidently been repeated en masse in the appearance, proliferation, and death of protein families, as demonstrated here through comparative analysis of 13 cyanobacterial genomes.

KEY WORDS: evolution