bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/584607; this version posted December 17, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Environmental interactions with amoebae as drivers of bacterial- 2 fungal endosymbiosis and pathogenicity 3 4 Herbert Itabangi1, Poppy C. S. Sephton-Clark1, Xin Zhou1, Georgina P. Starling2, Zamzam 5 Mahamoud2, Ignacio Insua3, Mark Probert1, Joao Correia1, Patrick J. Moynihan1, Teklegiorgis 6 Gebremariam4, Yiyou Gu4, Ashraf S. Ibrahim4,5, Gordon D. Brown6, Jason S. King2*, Elizabeth 7 R. Ballou1* and Kerstin Voelz1* 8 1Institute of Microbiology and Infection, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, 9 Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. 10 2Department of Biomedical Science, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 11 2TN, UK. 12 3School of Chemistry, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. 13 4 The Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, 14 Torrance, California, U.S.A. 15 5David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. 16 6 MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, University of Exeter, Geoffrey Pope Building, 17 Stocker Road, Exeter, EX4 4QD 18 19 * To whom correspondence should be addressed 20 JSK:
[email protected] 21 ERB:
[email protected] 22 KV:
[email protected] 23 24 25 Keywords: Murcomycete, Rhizopus, Ralstonia, Dictyostelium, endosymbiosis, evolution, soil 26 microbiology 27 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/584607; this version posted December 17, 2020.