Unexpected Discovery of Hypermutator Phenotype Sounds the Alarm for Quality Control Strains.

ABSTRACT: Microbial strains with high genomic stability are particularly sought after for testing the quality of commercial microbiological products, such as biological media and antibiotics. Yet, using mutation-accumulation experiments and de novo assembled complete genomes based on Nanopore long-read sequencing, we find that the widely used quality-control strain Shewanella putrefaciens ATCC-8071, also a facultative pathogen, is a hypermutator, with a base-pair substitution mutation rate of 2.42 × 10-8 per nucleotide site per cell division, ∼146-fold greater than that of the wild-type strain CGMCC-1.6515. Using complementation experiments, we confirm that mutL dysfunction, which was a recent evolutionary event, is the cause for the high mutation rate of ATCC-8071. Further analyses also give insigh

SUBMITTER: Wu K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8350357 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature