Evolutionary characteristics of bacterial two-component systems

Abstract

The evolution of biological systems is influenced by a number of factors and forces that have acted in different combinations at different times to give rise to extant organisms. Here we illustrate some of the issues surrounding the data-driven evolutionary analysis of biological systems in the context of bacterial two-component systems (TCSs). TCSs are critical for bacteria to interact with their extracellular environment. A typical TCS consists of a histidine kinase on the membrane and a response regulator in the cytoplasm. Here we comprehensively characterise the extent to which these appear together across some 950 bacterial species and test for statistically significant patterns of corr..