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Aerobic prokaryotes do not have higher GC contents than anaerobic prokaryotes, but obligate aerobic prokaryotes have.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Among the four bases, guanine is the most susceptible to damage from oxidative stress. Replication of DNA containing damaged guanines results in G to T mutations. Therefore, the mutations resulting from oxidative DNA damage are generally expected to predominantly consist of G to T (and C to A when the damaged guanine is not in the reference strand) and result in decreased GC content. However, the opposite pattern was reported 16 years ago in a study of prokaryotic genomes. Although that result has been widely cited and confirmed by nine later studies with similar methods, the omission of the effect of shared ancestry requires a re-examination of the reliability of the results. RESULTS:When aerobic and obligate aerobic prokaryotes were mixed together and anaerobic and obligate anaerobic prokaryotes were mixed together, phylogenetic controlled analyses did not detect significant difference in GC content between aerobic and anaerobic prokaryotes. This result is consistent with two generally neglected studied that had accounted for the phylogenetic relationship. However, when obligate aerobic prokaryotes were compared with aerobic prokaryotes, anaerobic prokaryotes, and obligate anaerobic prokaryotes separately using phylogenetic regression analysis, a significant positive association was observed between aerobiosis and GC content, no matter it was calculated from whole genome sequences or the 4-fold degenerate sites of protein-coding genes. Obligate aerobes have significantly higher GC content than aerobes, anaerobes, and obligate anaerobes. CONCLUSIONS:The positive association between aerobiosis and GC content could be attributed to a mutational force resulting from incorporation of damaged deoxyguanosine during DNA replication rather than oxidation of the guanine nucleotides within DNA sequences. Our results indicate a grade in the aerobiosis-associated mutational force, strong in obligate aerobes, moderate in aerobes, weak in anaerobes and obligate anaerobes.

SUBMITTER: Aslam S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6350292 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundGC pairs are generally more stable than AT pairs; GC-rich genomes were proposed to be more adapted to high temperatures than AT-rich genomes. Previous studies consistently showed positive correlations between growth temperature and the GC contents of structural RNA genes. However, for the whole genome sequences and the silent sites of the codons in protein-coding genes, the relationship between GC content and growth temperature is in a long-lasting debate.ResultsWith a dataset much larger than previous studies (681 bacteria and 155 archaea with completely assembled genomes), our phylogenetic comparative analyses showed positive correlations between optimal growth temperature (Topt) and GC content both in bacterial and archaeal structural RNA genes and in bacterial whole genome sequences, chromosomal sequences, plasmid sequences, core genes, and accessory genes. However, in the 155 archaea, we did not observe a significant positive correlation of Topt with whole-genome GC content (GCw) or GC content at four-fold degenerate sites. We randomly drew 155 samples from the 681 bacteria for 1000 rounds. In most cases (> 95%), the positive correlations between Topt and genomic GC contents became statistically nonsignificant (P > 0.05). This result suggested that the small sample sizes might account for the lack of positive correlations between growth temperature and genomic GC content in the 155 archaea and the bacterial samples of previous studies. Comparing the GC content among four categories (psychrophiles/psychrotrophiles, mesophiles, thermophiles, and hyperthermophiles) also revealed a positive correlation between GCw and growth temperature in bacteria. By including the GCw of incompletely assembled genomes, we expanded the sample size of archaea to 303. Positive correlations between GCw and Topt appear especially after excluding the halophilic archaea whose GC contents might be strongly shaped by intense UV radiation.ConclusionsThis study explains the previous contradictory observations and ends a long debate. Prokaryotes growing in high temperatures have higher GC contents. Thermal adaptation is one possible explanation for the positive association. Meanwhile, we propose that the elevated efficiency of DNA repair in response to heat mutagenesis might have the by-product of increasing GC content like that happens in intracellular symbionts and marine bacterioplankton.

Project description:Saccharomyces cerevisiae is unique among yeasts for its ability to grow rapidly in the complete absence of oxygen. S. cerevisiae is therefore an ideal eukaryotic model to study physiological adaptation to anaerobiosis. Recent transcriptome analyses have identified hundreds of genes that are transcriptionally regulated by oxygen availability but the relevance of this cellular response has not been systematically investigated at the key control level of the proteome. Therefore, the proteomic response of the S. cerevisiae to anaerobiosis was investigated using metabolic stable isotope labeling in aerobic and anaerobic glucose-limited chemostat cultures, followed by proteome analysis to relatively quantify protein expression. Using independent replicate cultures and stringent statistical filtering, a robust dataset of 474 quantified proteins was generated, of which 249 showed differential expression levels. While some of these changes were consistent with previous transcriptome studies, many responses of S. cerevisiae to oxygen availability were hitherto unreported. Comparison of transcriptome and proteome from identical cultivations yielded strong evidence for post-transcriptional regulation of key cellular processes, including glycolysis, amino-acyl tRNA synthesis, purine-nucleotide synthesis and amino-acid biosynthesis. The use of chemostat cultures provided well-controlled and reproducible culture conditions, which are essential for generating robust datasets at different cellular information levels. Integration of transcriptome and proteome data led to new insights in the physiology of anaerobically growing yeast that would not have been apparent from differential analyses at either the messenger RNA or protein level alone, thus illustrating the power of multi-level studies in yeast systems biology. Protein levels versus transcript level: Systematic analysis of the control levels at which the yeast response to anaerobiosis takes place was performed using previously published transcript data obtained from yeast cultures grown under strictly identical conditions as described for the current proteome analysis. Affymetrix microarrays from five aerobic and four anaerobic independent culture replicates were used for this analysis. These comparison data are summarized in the table below. These array data are publicly available at the gene expression repository Gene Expression Omnibus under accession number GSE4804. Keywords: proteomic, nanoflow-LC-MS/MS

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Aerobic prokaryotes do not have higher GC contents than anaerobic prokaryotes, but obligate aerobic prokaryotes have.

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