Publication Date:
2014-04-26
Description:
Extensive genomic diversity within coexisting members of a microbial species has been revealed through selected cultured isolates and metagenomic assemblies. Yet, the cell-by-cell genomic composition of wild uncultured populations of co-occurring cells is largely unknown. In this work, we applied large-scale single-cell genomics to study populations of the globally abundant marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. We show that they are composed of hundreds of subpopulations with distinct "genomic backbones," each backbone consisting of a different set of core gene alleles linked to a small distinctive set of flexible genes. These subpopulations are estimated to have diverged at least a few million years ago, suggesting ancient, stable niche partitioning. Such a large set of coexisting subpopulations may be a general feature of free-living bacterial species with huge populations in highly mixed habitats.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kashtan, Nadav -- Roggensack, Sara E -- Rodrigue, Sebastien -- Thompson, Jessie W -- Biller, Steven J -- Coe, Allison -- Ding, Huiming -- Marttinen, Pekka -- Malmstrom, Rex R -- Stocker, Roman -- Follows, Michael J -- Stepanauskas, Ramunas -- Chisholm, Sallie W -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Apr 25;344(6182):416-20. doi: 10.1126/science.1248575.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24763590" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Atlantic Ocean
;
Biological Evolution
;
Ecosystem
;
Genes, Bacterial
;
*Genetic Variation
;
*Genome, Bacterial
;
Metagenomics
;
Molecular Sequence Data
;
Mutation
;
Phylogeny
;
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
;
Prochlorococcus/classification/*genetics/*physiology
;
Seasons
;
Seawater/*microbiology
;
Sequence Analysis, DNA
;
Single-Cell Analysis
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
