1 TITLE 2 An updated phylogeny of the Alphaproteobacteria reveals that the parasitic Rickettsiales 3 and Holosporales have independent origins 4 AUTHORS 5 Sergio A. Muñoz-Gómez1,2, Sebastian Hess1,2, Gertraud Burger3, B. Franz Lang3, 6 Edward Susko2,4, Claudio H. Slamovits1,2*, and Andrew J. Roger1,2* 7 AUTHOR AFFILIATIONS 8 1 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; Dalhousie University; Halifax, 9 Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2; Canada. 10 2 Centre for Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Bioinformatics; Dalhousie 11 University; Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2; Canada. 12 3 Department of Biochemistry, Robert-Cedergren Center in Bioinformatics and 13 Genomics, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 14 4 Department of Mathematics and Statistics; Dalhousie University; Halifax, Nova Scotia, 15 B3H 4R2; Canada. 16 17 *Correspondence to: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; Dalhousie 18 University; Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2; Canada; 1 902 494 2881,
[email protected] 1 19 ABSTRACT 20 The Alphaproteobacteria is an extraordinarily diverse and ancient group of bacteria. 21 Previous attempts to infer its deep phylogeny have been plagued with methodological 22 artefacts. To overcome this, we analyzed a dataset of 200 single-copy and conserved 23 genes and employed diverse strategies to reduce compositional artefacts. Such 24 strategies include using novel dataset-specific profile mixture models and recoding 25 schemes, and removing sites, genes and taxa that are compositionally biased. We 26 show that the Rickettsiales and Holosporales (both groups of intracellular parasites of 27 eukaryotes) are not sisters to each other, but instead, the Holosporales has a derived 28 position within the Rhodospirillales.