Soil bacterial populations are shaped by recombination and gene-specific selection across a grassland meadow.

ABSTRACT: Soil microbial diversity is often studied from the perspective of community composition, but less is known about genetic heterogeneity within species. The relative impacts of clonal interference, gene-specific selection, and recombination in many abundant but rarely cultivated soil microbes remain unknown. Here we track genome-wide population genetic variation for 19 highly abundant bacterial species sampled from across a grassland meadow. Genomic inferences about population structure are made using the millions of sequencing reads that are assembled de novo into consensus genomes from metagenomes, as each read pair describes a short genomic sequence from a cell in each population. Genomic nucleotide identity of assembled genomes was significantly associated with local geography for over h

SUBMITTER: Crits-Christoph A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7305173 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature