Ordering microbial diversity into ecologically and genetically cohesive units
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Polz_Ordering microbial.pdf
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Author(s)
Shapiro, B. Jesse
Polz, Martin F
Date Issued
May 2014
Journal
Trends in Microbiology
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Shapiro, B. Jesse, and Martin F. Polz. “Ordering Microbial Diversity into Ecologically and Genetically Cohesive Units.” Trends in Microbiology 22, no. 5 (May 2014): 235–247.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We propose that microbial diversity must be viewed in light of gene flow and selection, which define units of genetic similarity, and of phenotype and ecological function, respectively. We discuss to what extent ecological and genetic units overlap to form cohesive populations in the wild, based on recent evolutionary modeling and on evidence from some of the first microbial populations studied with genomics. These show that if recombination is frequent and selection moderate, ecologically adaptive mutations or genes can spread within populations independently of their original genomic background (gene-specific sweeps). Alternatively, if the effect of recombination is smaller than selection, genome-wide selective sweeps should occur. In both cases, however, distinct units of overlapping ecological and genotypic similarity will form if microgeographic separation, likely involving ecological tradeoffs, induces barriers to gene flow. These predictions are supported by (meta)genomic data, which suggest that a ‘reverse ecology’ approach, in which genomic and gene flow information is used to make predictions about the nature of ecological units, is a powerful approach to ordering microbial diversity.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2014.02.006
