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The extracellular contractile injection system is enriched in environmental microbes and associates with numerous toxins.

Nature communications | 2021

The extracellular Contractile Injection System (eCIS) is a toxin-delivery particle that evolved from a bacteriophage tail. Four eCISs have previously been shown to mediate interactions between bacteria and their invertebrate hosts. Here, we identify eCIS loci in 1,249 bacterial and archaeal genomes and reveal an enrichment of these loci in environmental microbes and their apparent absence from mammalian pathogens. We show that 13 eCIS-associated toxin genes from diverse microbes can inhibit the growth of bacteria and/or yeast. We identify immunity genes that protect bacteria from self-intoxication, further supporting an antibacterial role for some eCISs. We also identify previously undescribed eCIS core genes, including a conserved eCIS transcriptional regulator. Finally, we present our data through an extensive eCIS repository, termed eCIStem. Our findings support eCIS as a toxin-delivery system that is widespread among environmental prokaryotes and likely mediates antagonistic interactions with eukaryotes and other prokaryotes.

Pubmed ID: 34145238 RIS Download

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


IMG System (tool)

RRID:SCR_002965

Resource for analysis and annotation of genome and metagenome datasets in comprehensive comparative context. IMG provides users with tools for analyzing publicly available genome datasets and metagenome datasets.

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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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CD-HIT (tool)

RRID:SCR_007105

THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on February 28,2023. Software program for clustering biological sequences with many applications in various fields such as making non-redundant databases, finding duplicates, identifying protein families, filtering sequence errors and improving sequence assembly etc. It is very fast and can handle extremely large databases. CD-HIT helps to significantly reduce the computational and manual efforts in many sequence analysis tasks and aids in understanding the data structure and correct the bias within a dataset. The CD-HIT package has CD-HIT, CD-HIT-2D, CD-HIT-EST, CD-HIT-EST-2D, CD-HIT-454, CD-HIT-PARA, PSI-CD-HIT, CD-HIT-OTU and over a dozen scripts. * CD-HIT (CD-HIT-EST) clusters similar proteins (DNAs) into clusters that meet a user-defined similarity threshold. * CD-HIT-2D (CD-HIT-EST-2D) compares 2 datasets and identifies the sequences in db2 that are similar to db1 above a threshold. * CD-HIT-454 identifies natural and artificial duplicates from pyrosequencing reads. * CD-HIT-OTU cluster rRNA tags into OTUs The usage of other programs and scripts can be found in CD-HIT user''s guide. CD-HIT was originally developed by Dr. Weizhong Li at Dr. Adam Godzik''s Lab at the Burnham Institute (now Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute).

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Django (tool)

RRID:SCR_012855

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Developed four years ago by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.

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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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trimAl (tool)

RRID:SCR_017334

Software tool for automated removal of spurious sequences or poorly aligned regions from multiple sequence alignment. Software package for automated alignment trimming in large scale phylogenetic analyses.

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EnhancedVolcano (tool)

RRID:SCR_018931

Software R package to produce publication ready volcano plots with enhanced colouring and labeling. Used to visualise results of differential expression analyses.

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