Ancient dynamin segments capture early stages of host–mitochondrial integration

Eukaryotic cells use dynamins-mechano-chemical GTPases--to drive the division of endosymbiotic organelles. Here we probe early steps of mitochondrial and chloroplast endosymbiosis by tracing the evolution of dynamins. We develop a parsimony-based phylogenetic method for protein sequence reconstruction, with deep time resolution. Using this, we demonstrate that dynamins diversify through the punctuated transformation of sequence segments on the...