Defining the core essential genome of Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Author(s)
Lander, Eric S.
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© 2019 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Genomics offered the promise of transforming antibiotic discovery by revealing many new essential genes as good targets, but the results fell short of the promise. While numerous factors contributed to the disappointing yield, one factor was that essential genes for a bacterial species were often defined based on a single or limited number of strains grown under a single or limited number of in vitro laboratory conditions. In fact, the essentiality of a gene can depend on both the genetic background and growth condition. We thus developed a strategy for more rigorously defining the core essential genome of a bacterial species by studying many pathogen strains and growth conditions. We assessed how many strains must be examined to converge on a set of core essential genes for a species. We used transposon insertion sequencing (Tn-Seq) to define essential genes in nine strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa on five different media and developed a statistical model, FiTnEss, to classify genes as essential versus nonessential across all strain–medium combinations. We defined a set of 321 core essential genes, representing 6.6% of the genome. We determined that analysis of four strains was typically sufficient in P. aeruginosa to converge on a set of core essential genes likely to be essential across the species across a wide range of conditions relevant to in vivo infection, and thus to represent attractive targets for novel drug discovery.
Date issued
2019-05Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of BiologyJournal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Lander, Eric S. 2019. "Defining the core essential genome of Pseudomonas aeruginosa." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116 (20).
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0027-8424