Congrats Brett & co!

Thanks Daan!

glad to be noticed by the mighty STC. big fan!

yeah for sure! been a long time.

Thanks Daan! Also for starting this whole thing with me. Hope to send sth to your inbox in a few months too : p

This work was led by Dr Yanlei Feng (senior scientist). Jingjing Ding (Postdoc) and Youxiong Lin (MSc student) led the experimental work. This paper wouldn't have come to a current form without the kind anonymous reviewers who provided so many helpful advice, many many thanks!

With these observations, we propose a model for the emergence of various innovations leading to the eukaryotic replisome.

We carefully examined the phylogeny of each replisome gene and reconstructed an archaea-eukaryotic replisome tree from 6 (mostly) single-copy genes. The Heimdall clan appeared sister to the eukaryotes in this context.

Sometimes those versions of HGT origin replaced the original version, and then became duplicated in the Last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). Quite a game of switching that sometimes can potentially confuse phylogenomic analyses. Fen1 is such an example.

There are two ways gene copies increase: 1. duplication, and 2. HGT. Asgards seemed to have mostly gained extra gene copies through HGT and innovated upon them.

We then went ahead to investigate how replisome gene copy expansions occurred. Quite unexpectedly, Asgards are not the ones who expanded most drastically with genomes size. Instead, they developed multi-copy phenomena for unique sets of genes.

The story of RFC in Lokiarchaeales is as complex as it is fascinating. A series of events of gains and losses in the evolutionary history leading to the eukaryotes was recorded in the present-day archaea, quite amazing!

Do you know that the cannonical archaeal PriL is smaller than the PriS? Because it was named after their eukaryotic homologs, where L > S. The missing link was found in the Heimdallarchaeia.

In this study, we found various intermediates in the Asgard archaea that resemble the eukaryotic variants.The Baldr pol is a recombinant of archaeal PolB and PolD, a long-sought-after link between Arc and Euk. Yeast 2 Hybrid confirmed the interactions.

Eukaryotes primarily inherited their DNA replication system (replisome) from Archaea, but of course they made it more sophisticated. In 2 ways: 1. dividing the functions of one complex by multiple homologous complexes, 2. turning a homomultimer into a heteromultimer. When and how did it happen?