Protein signatures (molecular synapomorphies) that are distinctive characteristics of the major cyanobacterial clades

A combination of phylogenomic and signature sequence-based (or phenetic) approaches was used to understand the evolutionary relationships among cyanobacteria. Phylogenetic trees were constructed for 34 cyanobacteria whose genomes have been sequenced, based on concatenated sequences for 45 conserved proteins and also the 16S rRNA gene. In parallel, sequence alignments of various proteins were examined to identify conserved indels (i.e. molecular …