Evolutionary analysis of trehalose breakdown pathways dataset

Trehalose is one of the most wide-spread and abundant disaccharide sugars in nature. It is widely used by organisms as a protectant, and is also a valuable energy reserve, since it can be broken down to glucose. Surprisingly, there is no current information on how widespread the breakdown of trehalose is across the tree of life. Further,  its breakdown and metabolism exhibit considerable diversity. Despite our mechanistic understanding of these individual enzymes, a comprehensive picture of their evolutionary origins, and their distribution across the tree of life is unknown. In this study, we comprehensively address how the different strategies for trehalose utilization may have evolved. For this, we performed a large-scale comparative genomic analysis of over 3,800 prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, mapping the distribution of trehalose breakdown and reconstructing their evolutionary histories. Our results reveal a clear dichotomy in trehalose utilization between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, with eukaryotes near-universally utilizing trehalose breakdown, while prokaryotes have many more pathways to breakdown trehalose but only sporadically do so.