Microbial species and intraspecies units exist and are maintained by ecological cohesiveness coupled to high homologous recombination.

ABSTRACT: Recent genomic analyses have revealed that microbial communities are predominantly composed of persistent, sequence-discrete species and intraspecies units (genomovars), but the mechanisms that create and maintain these units remain unclear. By analyzing closely-related isolate genomes from the same or related samples and identifying recent recombination events using a novel bioinformatics methodology, we show that high ecological cohesiveness coupled to frequent-enough and unbiased (i.e., not selection-driven) horizontal gene flow, mediated by homologous recombination, often underlie these diversity patterns. Ecological cohesiveness was inferred based on greater similarity in temporal abundance patterns of genomes of the same vs. different units, and recombination was shown to affect all

SUBMITTER: Conrad RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11568254 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature