Paleozoic diversification of terrestrial chitin-degrading bacterial lineages

Background Establishing the divergence times of groups of organisms is a major goal of evolutionary biology. This is especially challenging for microbial lineages due to the near-absence of preserved physical evidence (diagnostic body fossils or geochemical biomarkers). Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) can serve as a temporal scaffold between microbial groups and other fossil-calibrated clades, potentially improving these estimates. Specifically, HGT to or from organisms with fossil-calibrated age estimates can propagate these constraints to additional groups that lack fossils. While HGT is common between lineages, only a small subset of HGT events are potentially informative for dating microbial groups.