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Sequence context of indel mutations and their effect on protein evolution in a bacterial endosymbiont.

ABSTRACT: Indel mutations play key roles in genome and protein evolution, yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of how indels impact evolutionary processes. Genome-wide analyses enabled by next-generation sequencing can clarify the context and effect of indels, thereby integrating a more detailed consideration of indels with our knowledge of nucleotide substitutions. To this end, we sequenced Blochmannia chromaiodes, an obligate bacterial endosymbiont of carpenter ants, and compared it with the close relative, B. pennsylvanicus. The genetic distance between these species is small enough for accurate whole genome alignment but large enough to provide a meaningful spectrum of indel mutations. We found that indels are subjected to purifying selection in coding regions and even intergenic regions, which show a reduced rate of indel base pairs per kilobase compared with nonfunctional pseudogenes. Indels occur almost exclusively in repeat regions composed of homopolymers and multimeric simple sequence repeats, demonstrating the importance of sequence context for indel mutations. Despite purifying selection, some indels occur in protein-coding genes. Most are multiples of three, indicating selective pressure to maintain the reading frame. The deleterious effect of frameshift-inducing indels is minimized by either compensation from a nearby indel to restore reading frame or the indel's location near the 3'-end of the gene. We observed amino acid divergence exceeding nucleotide divergence in regions affected by frameshift-inducing indels, suggesting that these indels may either drive adaptive protein evolution or initiate gene degradation. Our results shed light on how indel mutations impact processes of molecular evolution underlying endosymbiont genome evolution.

SUBMITTER: Williams LE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3622351 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sequence context of indel mutations and their effect on protein evolution in a bacterial endosymbiont.

Williams Laura E LE Wernegreen Jennifer J JJ

Genome biology and evolution 20130101 3

Indel mutations play key roles in genome and protein evolution, yet we lack a comprehensive understanding of how indels impact evolutionary processes. Genome-wide analyses enabled by next-generation sequencing can clarify the context and effect of indels, thereby integrating a more detailed consideration of indels with our knowledge of nucleotide substitutions. To this end, we sequenced Blochmannia chromaiodes, an obligate bacterial endosymbiont of carpenter ants, and compared it with the close ...[more]

PMID: 23475937

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Project description:Alignment of large and diverse sequence sets is a common task in biological investigations, yet there remains considerable room for improvement in alignment quality. Multiple sequence alignment programs tend to reach maximal accuracy when aligning only a few sequences, and then diminish steadily as more sequences are added. This drop in accuracy can be partly attributed to a build-up of error and ambiguity as more sequences are aligned. Most high-throughput sequence alignment algorithms do not use contextual information under the assumption that sites are independent. This study examines the extent to which local sequence context can be exploited to improve the quality of large multiple sequence alignments.Two predictors based on local sequence context were assessed: (i) single sequence secondary structure predictions, and (ii) modulation of gap costs according to the surrounding residues. The results indicate that context-based predictors have appreciable information content that can be utilized to create more accurate alignments. Furthermore, local context becomes more informative as the number of sequences increases, enabling more accurate protein alignments of large empirical benchmarks. These discoveries became the basis for DECIPHER, a new context-aware program for sequence alignment, which outperformed other programs on large sequence sets.Predicting secondary structure based on local sequence context is an efficient means of breaking the independence assumption in alignment. Since secondary structure is more conserved than primary sequence, it can be leveraged to improve the alignment of distantly related proteins. Moreover, secondary structure predictions increase in accuracy as more sequences are used in the prediction. This enables the scalable generation of large sequence alignments that maintain high accuracy even on diverse sequence sets. The DECIPHER R package and source code are freely available for download at DECIPHER.cee.wisc.edu and from the Bioconductor repository.

Project description:BackgroundSogatella furcifera is a migratory pest that damages rice plants and causes severe economic losses. Due to its ability to annually migrate long distances, S. furcifera has emerged as a major pest of rice in several Asian countries. Symbiotic relationships of inherited bacteria with terrestrial arthropods have significant implications. The genus Cardinium is present in many types of arthropods, where it influences some host characteristics. We present a report of a newly identified strain of the bacterial endosymbiont Cardinium cSfur in S. furcifera.ResultFrom the whole genome of S. furcifera previously sequenced by our laboratory, we assembled the whole genome sequence of Cardinium cSfur. The sequence comprised 1,103,593 bp with a GC content of 39.2%. The phylogenetic tree of the Bacteroides phylum to which Cardinium cSfur belongs suggests that Cardinium cSfur is closely related to the other strains (Cardinium cBtQ1 and cEper1) that are members of the Amoebophilaceae family. Genome comparison between the host-dependent endosymbiont including Cardinium cSfur and free-living bacteria revealed that the endosymbiont has a smaller genome size and lower GC content, and has lost some genes related to metabolism because of its special environment, which is similar to the genome pattern observed in other insect symbionts. Cardinium cSfur has limited metabolic capability, which makes it less contributive to metabolic and biosynthetic processes in its host. From our findings, we inferred that, to compensate for its limited metabolic capability, Cardinium cSfur harbors a relatively high proportion of transport proteins, which might act as the hub between it and its host. With its acquisition of the whole operon related to biotin synthesis and glycolysis related genes through HGT event, Cardinium cSfur seems to be undergoing changes while establishing a symbiotic relationship with its host.ConclusionA novel bacterial endosymbiont strain (Cardinium cSfur) has been discovered. A genomic analysis of the endosymbiont in S. furcifera suggests that its genome has undergone certain changes to facilitate its settlement in the host. The envisaged potential reproduction manipulative ability of the new endosymbiont strain in its S. furcifera host has vital implications in designing eco-friendly approaches to combat the insect pest.

Dataset Information

Sequence context of indel mutations and their effect on protein evolution in a bacterial endosymbiont.

Publications

Sequence context of indel mutations and their effect on protein evolution in a bacterial endosymbiont.

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