Conventional efforts to describe essential genes in bacteria have typically emphasized nutrient-rich growth conditions. Of note, however, are the set of genes that become essential when bacteria are grown under nutrient stress. For example, more than 100 genes become indispensable when the model bacterium Escherichia coli is grown on nutrient-limited media, and many of these nutrient stress genes have also been shown to be important for the growth of various bacterial pathogens in vivo To better understand the genetic network that underpins nutrient stress in E. coli, we performed a genome-scale cross of strains harboring deletions in some 82 nutrient stress genes with the entire E. coli gene deletion collection (Keio) to create 315,400 double deletion mutants. An analysis of the growth of the resulting strains on rich microbiological media revealed an average of 23 synthetic sick or lethal genetic interactions for each nutrient stress gene, suggesting that the network defining nutrient stress is surprisingly complex. A vast majority of these interactions involved genes of unknown function or genes of unrelated pathways. The most profound synthetic lethal interactions were between nutrient acquisition and biosynthesis. Further, the interaction map reveals remarkable metabolic robustness in E. coli through pathway redundancies. In all, the genetic interaction network provides a powerful tool to mine and identify missing links in nutrient synthesis and to further characterize genes of unknown function in E. coli Moreover, understanding of bacterial growth under nutrient stress could aid in the development of novel antibiotic discovery platforms.
Pubmed ID: 27879333 RIS Download
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BioLayout Express3D is a powerful new tool for the visualization and analysis of networks derived from biological systems. Network-based approaches are becoming increasing popular for the analysis of ''omics and other high dimensional data. Networks can be produced from a wide variety of biological relationships, such as interactions between individuals, disease transmission, sequence similarity, metabolic pathways, protein interactions, pathways, regulatory cascades, gene expression, etc. BioLayout Express3D has been specifically designed for visualization, clustering and analysis of large network graphs in two- and three-dimensional space derived primarily, but not exclusively, from biological data. Sponsors: This resource is supported by BBSRC (BB / F003722 / 1) and the Wellcome Trust (GR077040RP). Keywords: Biology, Tool, Software, visualization, Analysis, Network, Biological, System, Dimentional, Data, Disease, Transmission, Sequence, Metabolic, Pathway, Protein, Interaction, Gene, Expression, Clustering, Analysis,
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