Life at the extremes: maximally divergent microbes with similar genomic signatures linked to extreme environments.

ABSTRACT: Extreme environments impose strong mutation and selection pressures that drive distinctive, yet understudied, genomic adaptations in extremophiles. In this study, we identify 15 bacterium-archaeon pairs that exhibit highly similar [Formula: see text]-mer-based genomic signatures despite maximal taxonomic divergence, suggesting that shared environmental conditions can produce convergent, genome-wide sequence patterns that transcend evolutionary distance. To uncover these patterns, we developed a computational pipeline to select a composite genome proxy assembled from noncontiguous subsequences of the genome. Using supervised machine learning on a curated dataset of 693 extremophile microbial genomes, we found that 6-mers and 100 kbp genome proxy lengths provide the best balance between clas

SUBMITTER: Safari M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12723239 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature