Feb, 9. 2016, a paper entitled “Multi-omics analysis of niche specificity provides new insights into ecological adaptation in bacteria” has been published online in The ISME Journal (IF=9.302) from Nature press, which revealed a new mechanism of bacterial adaption to microenvironments using multi-omics analysis. Dr. Bo Zhu and Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim were the co-first authors, while Dr. Bin Li and Prof. Xueping Zhou were the co-corresponding authors.
Why the closely related bacterial strains in the same genus could play different functions in natural ecology? In order to elucidate the hotspot in the field of evolutionary bacteriology, this study performed genome-wide survey of the ecological adaptation in four Burkholderia seminalis strains, distinguished by their origin as part of the saprophytic microbial community of soil or water but also including human and plant pathogens, which provided insights of niche-specific adaptation in bacteria.
The results indicated that each strain is separated from the others by increased fitness in medium simulating its original niche corresponding to the difference between strains in metabolic capacities. Moreover, strain-specific metabolism and niche survival was generally linked with genomic variants and niche-dependent differential expression of the corresponding genes. In particular, the importance of iron, trehalose and d-arabitol utilization was highlighted by the involvement of DNA-methylation and horizontal gene transfer in niche-adapted regulation of the corresponding operons based on the integrated analysis of our multi-omics data.
Furthermore, two related papers have also been published in Scientific Reports from Nature press (IF=5.578; 2014, 4:5698,DOI:10.1038/srep05698；2016, 6:22241,doi: 10.1038/srep22241), which revealed the molecular mechanisms of the adaptation of rice bacterial pathogen Acidovorax avenae subsp. avenae to rice host and β-lactam antibiotics.
The work was supported by State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China.
(Institution of biotechnology)
Link to full paper in The ISME Journal: http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ismej2015251a.html