Metabolic streamlining in an open-ocean nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium

H. James Tripp, Shellie R. Bench, Kendra A. Turk, Rachel A. Foster, Brian A. Desany, Faheem Niazi, Jason P. Affourtit and Jonathan P. Zehr ()
Additional contact information
H. James Tripp: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Shellie R. Bench: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Kendra A. Turk: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Rachel A. Foster: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Brian A. Desany: 454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company, 20 Commercial Street, Branford, Connecticut 06405, USA
Faheem Niazi: 454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company, 20 Commercial Street, Branford, Connecticut 06405, USA
Jason P. Affourtit: 454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company, 20 Commercial Street, Branford, Connecticut 06405, USA
Jonathan P. Zehr: University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA

Nature, 2010, vol. 464, issue 7285, 90-94

Abstract: A lean, mean microbe The as-yet uncultivated nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium known as UCYN-A is widely distributed in the world's oceans. Metagenomic analysis has shown it to lack genes for the oxygen-producing photosystem II complex of the photosynthetic apparatus — which helps it fix nitrogen in the daylight — and for carbon fixation. Now using massively parallel paired-end pyrosequencing technology, the complete UCYN-A genome has been determined. It emerges as a remarkably simple organism, lacking many core metabolic pathways and depending heavily on other organisms for organic carbon and even organic nitrogen-containing compounds. Though the genome has structural similarities to chloroplasts and endosymbionts, experiments on natural populations have so far not detected any symbiotic relationships with other microbes.

Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1038/nature08786

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