engleski

Analysis of metagenomes in extreme environments

Not all prokaryotes are amenable to cultivation in laboratory conditions, and increasing amounts of knowledge about microbial diversity is gained from direct sampling of DNA from environments. A rapidly developing field that studies whole microbial communities is metagenomics, the culture-independent genomic study of organisms extracted directly from an ecological niche. Prokaryotic genomes show strong codon usage bias (CUB). CUB is directly correlated with expression levels of genes because codons used by genes expressed at high levels are encoded for by the most abundant tRNAs. Therefore, the CUB of a gene can be linked to its expression level through translational optimization. We show that metagenomes, much like genomes, also show CUB and that this phenomenon can be used to predict the expression level of genes at the level of the entire microbial community. We analyzed adaptation of organisms in metagenomes to their extreme environments through this approach.

metagenomics; codon usage bias; extreme environments

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