Abstract
Microbial strains with high genomic stability are particularly sought after for testing the quality of commercial microbiological products, such as biological media and antibiotics. Yet, using mutation-accumulation experiments and de novo assembled complete genomes based on Nanopore long-read sequencing, we find that the widely used quality-control strain Shewanella putrefaciens ATCC-8071, also a facultative pathogen, is a hypermutator, with a base-pair substitution mutation rate of 2.42 × 10-8 per nucleotide site per cell division, ∼146-fold greater than that of the wild-type strain CGMCC-1.6515. Using complementation experiments, we confirm that mutL dysfunction, which was a recent evolutionary event, is the cause for the high mutation rate of ATCC-8071. Further analyses also give insight into possible relationships between mutation and genome evolution in this important bacterium. This discovery of a well-known strain being a hypermutator necessitates screening the mutation rate of bacterial strains before any quality control or experiments.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Article number | evab148 |
Journal | Genome biology and evolution |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2021 |
Keywords
- DNA mismatch repair
- Shewanella
- comparative genomics
- genome evolution
- mutation spectrum
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Genetics