A fragile metabolic network adapted for cooperation in the symbiotic bacterium Buchnera aphidicola.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In silico analyses provide valuable insight into the biology of obligately intracellular pathogens and symbionts with small genomes. There is a particular opportunity to apply systems-level tools developed for the model bacterium Escherichia coli to study the evolution and function of symbiotic bacteria which are metabolically specialised to overproduce specific nutrients for their host and, remarkably, have a gene complement that is a subset of the E. coli genome.

Results

We have reconstructed and analysed the metabolic network of the gamma-proteobacterium Buchnera aphidicola (symbiont of the pea aphid) as a model for using systems-level approaches to discover key traits of symbionts with small genomes. The metabolic network is extremely fragile with > 90% of the

SUBMITTER: Thomas GH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2649895 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature