The evolutionary genomics of adaptation to stress in wild rhizobium bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Microbiota comprise the bulk of life's diversity, yet we know little about how populations of microbes accumulate adaptive diversity across natural landscapes. Adaptation to stressful soil conditions in plants provides seminal examples of adaptation in response to natural selection via allelic substitution. For microbes symbiotic with plants however, horizontal gene transfer allows for adaptation via gene gain and loss, which could generate fundamentally different evolutionary dynamics. We use comparative genomics and genetics to elucidate the evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation to physiologically stressful serpentine soils in rhizobial bacteria in western North American grasslands. In vitro experiments demonstrate that the presence of a locus of major effect, the nre operon, is n

SUBMITTER: Kehlet-Delgado H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10990125 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature