Exploring the evolutionary dynamics of plasmids: the Acinetobacter pan-plasmidome

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Lenie Dijkshoorn¹  Matteo Brilli²  Mario Vaneechoutte³  Marco Fondi⁴  Maria Cristiana Papaleo⁴  Giovanni Bacci⁴  Alessio Mengoni⁴  Renato Fani⁴ 

[1] Department of Infectious Diseases, Leiden University Medical Center, PO Box 9600, 2300, Leiden, RC, The Netherlands;Laboratoire de Biometrie et Biologie Evolutive, UMR CNRS, 5558, Lyon, France;Laboratory Bacteriology Research, Faculty Medicine & Health Sciences, University of Ghent, Belgium, France;Laboratory of Microbial and Molecular Evolution, Dept. of Evolutionary Biology, Via Romana 17-19, University of Florence, I-50125, Florence, Italy;

关键词: Protein Cluster;    Phylogenetic Profile;    Horizontal Gene Transfer Event;    Identity Threshold;    Functional Assignment;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-10-59

 received in 2009-10-28, accepted in 2010-02-24,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundProkaryotic plasmids have a dual importance in the microbial world: first they have a great impact on the metabolic functions of the host cell, providing additional traits that can be accumulated in the cell without altering the gene content of the bacterial chromosome. Additionally and/or alternatively, from a genome perspective, plasmids can provide a basis for genomic rearrangements via homologous recombination and so they can facilitate the loss or acquisition of genes during these events, which eventually may lead to horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given their importance for conferring adaptive traits to the host organisms, the interest in plasmid sequencing is growing and now many complete plasmid sequences are available online.ResultsBy using the newly developed Blast2Network bioinformatic tool, a comparative analysis was performed on the plasmid and chromosome sequence data available for bacteria belonging to the genus Acinetobacter, an ubiquitous and clinically important group of γ-proteobacteria. Data obtained showed that, although most of the plasmids lack mobilization and transfer functions, they have probably a long history of rearrangements with other plasmids and with chromosomes. Indeed, traces of transfers between different species can be disclosed.ConclusionsWe show that, by combining plasmid and chromosome similarity, identity based, network analysis, an evolutionary scenario can be described even for highly mobile genetic elements that lack extensively shared genes. In particular we found that transposases and selective pressure for mercury resistance seem to have played a pivotal role in plasmid evolution in Acinetobacter genomes sequenced so far.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Fondi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.