Syntrophy among Archaea and Bacteria facilitates the anaerobic degradation of organic compounds to CH4 and CO2. Particularly during aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbon mineralization, as in the case of crude oil reservoirs and petroleum-contaminated sediments, metabolic interactions between obligate mutualistic microbial partners are of central importance. Using micromanipulation combined with shotgun metagenomic approaches, we describe the genomes of complex consortia within short-chain alkane-degrading cultures operating under methanogenic conditions. Metabolic reconstruction revealed that only a small fraction of genes in the metagenome-assembled genomes encode the capacity for fermentation of alkanes facilitated by energy conservation linked to H2 metabolism. Instead, the presence of inferred lifestyles based on scavenging anabolic products and intermediate fermentation products derived from detrital biomass was a common feature. Additionally, inferred auxotrophy for vitamins and amino acids suggests that the hydrocarbon-degrading microbial assemblages are structured and maintained by multiple interactions beyond the canonical H2-producing and syntrophic alkane degrader-methanogen partnership. Compared to previous work, our report points to a higher order of complexity in microbial consortia engaged in anaerobic hydrocarbon transformation. IMPORTANCE Microbial interactions between Archaea and Bacteria mediate many important chemical transformations in the biosphere from degrading abundant polymers to synthesis of toxic compounds. Two of the most pressing issues in microbial interactions are how consortia are established and how we can modulate these microbial communities to express desirable functions. Here, we propose that public goods (i.e., metabolites of high energy demand in biosynthesis) facilitate energy conservation for life under energy-limited conditions and determine the assembly and function of the consortia. Our report suggests that an understanding of public good dynamics could result in new ways to improve microbial pollutant degradation in anaerobic systems.
Pubmed ID: 29104938 RIS Download
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A database of protein families, each represented by multiple sequence alignments and hidden Markov models (HMMs). Users can analyze protein sequences for Pfam matches, view Pfam family annotation and alignments, see groups of related families, look at the domain organization of a protein sequence, find the domains on a PDB structure, and query Pfam by keywords. There are two components to Pfam: Pfam-A and Pfam-B. Pfam-A entries are high quality, manually curated families that may automatically generate a supplement using the ADDA database. These automatically generated entries are called Pfam-B. Although of lower quality, Pfam-B families can be useful for identifying functionally conserved regions when no Pfam-A entries are found. Pfam also generates higher-level groupings of related families, known as clans (collections of Pfam-A entries which are related by similarity of sequence, structure or profile-HMM).
View all literature mentionsTool for searching sequence databases for homologs of protein sequences, and for making protein sequence alignments. It implements methods using probabilistic models called profile hidden Markov models (profile HMMs). Compared to BLAST, FASTA, and other sequence alignment and database search tools based on older scoring methodology, HMMER aims to be significantly more accurate and more able to detect remote homologs because of the strength of its underlying mathematical models. In the past, this strength came at significant computational expense, but in the new HMMER3 project, HMMER is now essentially as fast as BLAST.
View all literature mentionsA powerful toolset for genome arithmetic allowing one to address common genomics tasks such as finding feature overlaps and computing coverage. Bedtools allows one to intersect, merge, count, complement, and shuffle genomic intervals from multiple files in widely-used genomic file formats such as BAM, BED, GFF/GTF, VCF. While each individual tool is designed to do a relatively simple task (e.g., intersect two interval files), quite sophisticated analyses can be conducted by combining multiple bedtools operations on the UNIX command line.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool for windowed adaptive trimming for fastq files using quality. Supports quality values like Illumina, Solexa, and Sanger. Takes the quality values and slides a window across them whose length is 0.1 times the length of the read.
View all literature mentionsSoftware pipeline for reconstructing highly accurate and resolved phylogenetic trees based on whole-genome sequence information. Pipeline is scalable to thousands of genomes and uses the most conserved 400 proteins for extracting the phylogenetic signal. PhyloPhlAn also implements taxonomic curation, estimation, and insertion operations.
View all literature mentionsTHIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on February 28,2023. Software tool for the rapid annotation of prokaryotic genomes. It produces GFF3, GBK and SQN files that are ready for editing in Sequin and ultimately submitted to Genbank/DDJB/ENA. A typical 4 Mbp genome can be fully annotated in less than 10 minutes on a quad-core computer, and scales well to 32 core SMP systems.
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