About the Authors

Gazalah Sabehi

Contributed equally to this work with: Gazalah Sabehi, Alexander Loy

Affiliation Department of Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Alexander Loy

Contributed equally to this work with: Gazalah Sabehi, Alexander Loy

Affiliation Department of Microbial Ecology, University of Vienna, Austria

Kwang-Hwan Jung

¤ Current address: Department of Life Science, Interdisciplinary Program of Integrated Biotechnology, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea

Affiliation Center for Membrane Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Texas, United States of America

Ranga Partha

Affiliation Center for Membrane Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Texas, United States of America

John L Spudich

Affiliation Center for Membrane Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas Medical School, Houston, Texas, United States of America

Tal Isaacson

Affiliation Department of Genetics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Joseph Hirschberg

Affiliation Department of Genetics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Michael Wagner

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: wagner@microbial-ecology.net (MW), Email: beja@tx.technion.ac.il (OB)

Affiliation Department of Microbial Ecology, University of Vienna, Austria

Oded Béjà

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: wagner@microbial-ecology.net (MW), Email: beja@tx.technion.ac.il (OB)

Affiliation Department of Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

GS, AL, JLS, JH, and OB conceived and designed the experiments. GS, AL, RP, TI, and JH performed the experiments. GS, AL, RP, JLS, TI, JH, MW, and OB analyzed the data. GS, KHJ, JLS, and JH contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools. AL, JLS, JH, MW, and OB wrote the paper.