bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.08.331884; this version posted October 9, 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 The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.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-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Phylogenetic evidence of headful packaging strategy in gene transfer 2 agents 3 4 Emma Esterman1, Yuri I. Wolf2, Roman Kogay1, Eugene V. Koonin2, and Olga Zhaxybayeva1,3* 5 6 1 Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA 7 2 National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 8 20894, USA 9 3 Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA 10 11 *corresponding author:
[email protected] 12 13 14 Keywords: large terminase, terL, DNA packaging, Rhodobacter capsulatus, RcGTA, 15 alphaproteobacteria 16 17 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.08.331884; this version posted October 9, 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 The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.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-ND 4.0 International license. 18 Abstract 19 Gene transfer agents (GTAs) are virus-like particles encoded and produced by many 20 bacteria and archaea. Unlike viruses, GTAs package fragments of the host genome instead of the 21 genes that encode the components of the GTA itself. As a result of this non-specific DNA 22 packaging, GTAs can transfer genes within bacterial and archaeal communities.