Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-29-2019
Publication Title
mSystems
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Volume
4
Issue
5
First page number:
1
Last page number:
10
Abstract
The evolution of microbial magnetoreception (or magnetotaxis) is of great interest in the fields of microbiology, evolutionary biology, biophysics, geomicrobiology, and geochemistry. Current genomic data from magnetotactic bacteria (MTB), the only prokaryotes known to be capable of sensing the Earth’s geomagnetic field, suggests an ancient origin of magnetotaxis in the domain Bacteria. Vertical inheritance, followed by multiple independent magnetosome gene cluster loss, is considered to be one of the major forces that drove the evolution of magnetotaxis at or above the class or phylum level, although the evolutionary trajectories at lower taxonomic ranks (e.g., within the class level) remain largely unstudied. Here we report the isolation, cultivation, and sequencing of a novel magnetotactic spirillum belonging to the genus Terasakiella (Terasakiella sp. strain SH-1) within the class Alphaproteobacteria. The complete genome sequence of Terasakiella sp. strain SH-1 revealed an unexpected duplication event of magnetosome genes within the mamAB operon, a group of genes essential for magnetosome biomineralization and magnetotaxis. Intriguingly, further comparative genomic analysis suggests that the duplication of mamAB genes is a common feature in the genomes of alphaproteobacterial MTB. Taken together, with the additional finding that gene duplication appears to have also occurred in some magnetotactic members of the Deltaproteobacteria, our results indicate that gene duplication plays an important role in the evolution of magnetotaxis in the Alphaproteobacteria and perhaps the domain Bacteria.
Keywords
Terasakiella; Evolution; Gene duplication; Genomes; Magnetosome gene cluster; Magnetotactic bacteria; Magnetrotaxis; Pure cultivation
Disciplines
Genetics and Genomics
File Format
File Size
4.901 KB
Language
English
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Repository Citation
Du, H.,
Zhang, W.,
Zhang, W.,
Zhang, W.,
Pan, H.,
Pan, Y.,
Bazylinski, D. A.,
Wu, L.,
Xiao, T.,
Lin, W.
(2019).
Magnetosome Gene Duplication as an Important Driver in the Evolution of Magnetotaxis in the Alphaproteobacteria.
mSystems, 4(5),
1-10.
American Society for Microbiology.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00315-19