Valerio Orlandini, Giovanni Emiliani, Marco Fondi, Isabel Maida, Elena Perrin, Renato Fani
Azospirillum brasilense is a nitrogen-fixing bacterium living in association with plant roots. The genome of the strain Sp245, isolated in Brazil from wheat roots, consists of one chromosome and six plasmids. In this work, the A. brasilense Sp245 plasmids were analyzed in order to shed some light on the evolutionary pathways they followed over time. To this purpose, a similarity network approach was applied in order to identify the evolutionary relationships among all the A. brasilense plasmids encoded proteins; in this context a computational pipeline specifically devoted to the analysis and the visualization of the network-like evolutionary relationships among different plasmids molecules was developed...
2014: International Journal of Evolutionary Biology