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Reconstructing the functions of endosymbiotic Mollicutes in fungus-growing ants.

Panagiotis Sapountzis | Mariya Zhukova | Jonathan Z Shik | Morten Schiott | Jacobus J Boomsma
eLife | 2018

Mollicutes, a widespread class of bacteria associated with animals and plants, were recently identified as abundant abdominal endosymbionts in healthy workers of attine fungus-farming leaf-cutting ants. We obtained draft genomes of the two most common strains harbored by Panamanian fungus-growing ants. Reconstructions of their functional significance showed that they are independently acquired symbionts, most likely to decompose excess arginine consistent with the farmed fungal cultivars providing this nitrogen-rich amino-acid in variable quantities. Across the attine lineages, the relative abundances of the two Mollicutes strains are associated with the substrate types that foraging workers offer to fungus gardens. One of the symbionts is specific to the leaf-cutting ants and has special genomic machinery to catabolize citrate/glucose into acetate, which appears to deliver direct metabolic energy to the ant workers. Unlike other Mollicutes associated with insect hosts, both attine ant strains have complete phage-defense systems, underlining that they are actively maintained as mutualistic symbionts.

Pubmed ID: 30454555

Associated grants

  • Agency: European Research Council, International
    Id: 323085
  • Agency: European Research Council, International
    Id: ERC Advanced Grant 323085

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


SAMTOOLS (tool)

RRID:SCR_002105

Original SAMTOOLS package has been split into three separate repositories including Samtools, BCFtools and HTSlib. Samtools for manipulating next generation sequencing data used for reading, writing, editing, indexing,viewing nucleotide alignments in SAM,BAM,CRAM format. BCFtools used for reading, writing BCF2,VCF, gVCF files and calling, filtering, summarising SNP and short indel sequence variants. HTSlib used for reading, writing high throughput sequencing data.

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Ensembl (tool)

RRID:SCR_002344

Collection of genome databases for vertebrates and other eukaryotic species with DNA and protein sequence search capabilities. Used to automatically annotate genome, integrate this annotation with other available biological data and make data publicly available via web. Ensembl tools include BLAST, BLAT, BioMart and the Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) for all supported species.

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UniProt (tool)

RRID:SCR_002380

Collection of data of protein sequence and functional information. Resource for protein sequence and annotation data. Consortium for preservation of the UniProt databases: UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef), and UniProt Archive (UniParc), UniProt Proteomes. Collaboration between European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and Protein Information Resource. Swiss-Prot is a curated subset of UniProtKB.

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Pfam (tool)

RRID:SCR_004726

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).

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Hmmer (tool)

RRID:SCR_005305

Tool 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.

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InterProScan (tool)

RRID:SCR_005829

Software package for functional analysis of sequences by classifying them into families and predicting presence of domains and sites. Scans sequences against InterPro's signatures. Characterizes nucleotide or protein function by matching it with models from several different databases. Used in large scale analysis of whole proteomes, genomes and metagenomes. Available as Web based version and standalone Perl version and SOAP Web Service.

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RAxML (tool)

RRID:SCR_006086

Software program for phylogenetic analyses of large datasets under maximum likelihood.

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ProDom (tool)

RRID:SCR_006969

Comprehensive set of protein domain families automatically generated from UniProt Knowledge Database. Automated clustering of homologous domains generated from global comparison of all available protein sequences.

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HAMAP (tool)

RRID:SCR_007701

HAMAP is a system, based on manual protein annotation, that identifies and semi-automatically annotates proteins that are part of well-conserved families or subfamilies: the HAMAP families. HAMAP is based on manually created family rules and is applied to bacterial, archaeal and plastid-encoded proteins.

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FigTree (tool)

RRID:SCR_008515

A graphical viewer of phylogenetic trees and a program for producing publication-ready figures. It is designed to display summarized and annotated trees produced by BEAST.

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MUSCLE (tool)

RRID:SCR_011812

Multiple sequence alignment method with reduced time and space complexity.Multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Data analysis service for multiple sequence comparison by log- expectation.

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MrBayes (tool)

RRID:SCR_012067

THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE.Documented on February 28,2023. Software program for Bayesian inference and model choice across a wide range of phylogenetic and evolutionary models.

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KEGG (tool)

RRID:SCR_012773

Integrated database resource consisting of 16 main databases, broadly categorized into systems information, genomic information, and chemical information. In particular, gene catalogs in completely sequenced genomes are linked to higher-level systemic functions of cell, organism, and ecosystem. Analysis tools are also available. KEGG may be used as reference knowledge base for biological interpretation of large-scale datasets generated by sequencing and other high-throughput experimental technologies.

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Adobe Photoshop (tool)

RRID:SCR_014199

Software for image processing, analysis, and editing. The software includes features such as touch capabilities, a customizable toolbar, 2D and 3D image merging, and Cloud access and options.

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FastTree (tool)

RRID:SCR_015501

Source code that infers approximately-maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees from alignments of nucleotide or protein sequences. It uses the Jukes-Cantor or generalized time-reversible (GTR) models of nucleotide evolution and the JTT, WAG, or LG models of amino acid evolution.

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Phobius (tool)

RRID:SCR_015643

Web application for combined transmembrane topology and signal peptide prediction. Used for whole genome annotation of signal peptides and transmembrane regions. Predictor is based on hidden Markov model (HMM) that models different sequence regions of signal peptide and different regions of transmembrane protein in series of interconnected states.

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SignalP (tool)

RRID:SCR_015644

Web application for prediction of the presence and location of signal peptide cleavage sites in amino acid sequences from different organisms. The method incorporates a prediction of cleavage sites and a signal peptide/non-signal peptide prediction based on a combination of several artificial neural networks.

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