Abstract
The minimal cell concept represents a pragmatic approach to the question of how few genes are required to run a cell. This is a helpful way to build a parts-list, and has been more successful than attempts to deduce a minimal gene set for life by inferring the gene repertoire of the last universal common ancestor, as few genes trace back to this hypothetical ancestral state. However, the study of minimal cellular systems is the study of biological outliers where, by practical necessity, coevolutionary interactions are minimized or ignored. In this paper, we consider the biological context from which minimal genomes have been removed. For instance, some of the most reduced genomes are from endosymbionts and are the result of coevolutionary interactions with a host; few such organisms are “free-living.” As few, if any, biological systems exist in complete isolation, we expect that, as with modern life, early biological systems were part of an ecosystem, replete with organismal interactions. We favor refocusing discussions of the evolution of cellular systems on processes rather than gene counts. We therefore draw a distinction between a pragmatic minimal cell (an interesting engineering problem), a distributed genome (a system resulting from an evolutionary transition involving more than one cell) and the looser coevolutionary interactions that are ubiquitous in ecosystems. Finally, we consider the distributed genome and coevolutionary interactions between genomic entities in the context of early evolution.
Highlights
The minimal genome concept is a theoretical idea that has been considered in two different arenas
As a way to navigate this topic, we briefly summarize three concepts: 1. The pragmatic minimal genome concept
Endosymbionts that are well on the spectrum to becoming organelles are not minimal genomes, but may be part of an emerging distributed genome, though it may be difficult in practice to determine the tipping point at which a set of closely interacting individuals becomes an evolutionarily stable, distributed genome
Summary
The minimal genome concept is a theoretical idea that has been considered in two different arenas. The common ground between these efforts is that both the LUCA and the minimal cell concept focus on the internal parts-list of the genome: the gene set.
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