The evolution of morphological development is congruent with the species phylogeny in the genus Streptomyces

<p>As the canonical model organism to dissect bacterial morphological development, <em>Streptomyces</em> species had attracted much attention from the microbiological society. However, the evolution of development-related genes in <em>Streptomyces</em> remains elusive. Here, we evaluate the distribution of development-related genes, thus indicating the majority of these genes were ubiquitous in <em>Streptomyces</em> genomes. Furthermore, we compare the phylogenetic topologies of related strict orthologous genes to the species tree of <em>Streptomyces</em>, from both concatenation and single-gene tree analyses. Meanwhile, the reconciled gene tree and normalization based on the number of parsimony-informative sites were also employed to reduce the impact of phylogenetic conflicts, which was induced by uncertainty in single-gene tree inference based merely on the sequence and the bias in the amount of phylogenetic information caused by variable numbers of parsimony-informative sites. We found that the development-related genes had higher congruence to the species tree than other strict orthologous genes. Considering the development-related genes could also be tracked back to the common ancestor of <em>Streptomyces</em>, these results suggest that morphological development follows the same pattern as species divergence.</p>