ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2008
Extreme polyploidy in a large bacterium.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers.
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Who cites it
66 citing papers in PubMed, 154 citations in OpenAlex.
- Integrating theory and machine learning to reveal determinants of plasmid copy number.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Interpreting UniFrac with absolute abundance: a conceptual and practical guide.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Scaling laws of bacterial and archaeal plasmids.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The exceptional form and function of the giant bacteriumProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Metagenome-derived virus-microbe ratios across ecosystems.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- One Advantage of Being Polyploid: Prokaryotes of Various Phylogenetic Groups Can Grow in the Absence of an Environmental Phosphate Source at the Expense of Their High Genome Copy Numbers.Microorganisms · 2023Article
- Genomic Mysteries of Giant Bacteria: Insights and Implications.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- An Emerging Animal Model for Querying the Role of Whole Genome Duplication in Development, Evolution, and Disease.Journal of developmental biology · 2023Review
- The role of mitochondrial energetics in the origin and diversification of eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Extreme Polyploidy ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Challenges Faced by Highly Polyploid Bacteria with Limits on DNA Inheritance.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Review
- Challenges in benchmarking metagenomic profilers.Nature methods · 2021Article
- Heterozygous, Polyploid, Giant Bacterium, Achromatium, Possesses an Identical Functional Inventory Worldwide across Drastically Different Ecosystems.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Ethanologenic Bacterium Zymomonas mobilis Divides Asymmetrically and Exhibits Heterogeneity in DNA Content.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2021Article
- Genome Copy Number Quantification Revealed That the Ethanologenic Alpha-ProteobacteriumFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Isolation of Lineage Specific Nuclei Based on Distinct Endoreduplication Levels and Tissue-Specific Markers to Study Chromatin Accessibility Landscapes.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Factors That Affect the Enlargement of Bacterial Protoplasts and Spheroplasts.International journal of molecular sciences · 2020Review
- Revisiting the hypothesis of an energetic barrier to genome complexity between eukaryotes and prokaryotes.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Article
- Too Much of a Good Thing: How Ectopic DNA Replication Affects Bacterial Replication Dynamics.Frontiers in microbiology · 2020Review
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cells rely on diffusion to move metabolites and biomolecules. Diffusion is highly efficient but only over short distances. Although eukaryotic cells have broken free of diffusion-dictated constraints on cell size, most bacteria and archaea are forced to remain small. Exceptions to this rule are found among the bacterial symbionts of surgeonfish; Epulopiscium spp. are cigar-shaped cells that reach lengths in excess of 600 mum. A large Epulopiscium contains thousands of times more DNA than a bacterium such as Escherichia coli, but the composition of this DNA is not well understood. Here, we present evidence that Epulopiscium contains tens of thousands of copies of its genome. Using quantitative, single-cell PCR assays targeting single-copy genes, we have determined that copy number is positively correlated with Epulopiscium cell size. Although other bacteria are known to possess multiple genomes, polyploidy of the magnitude observed in Epulopiscium is unprecedented. The arrangement of genomes around the cell periphery may permit regional responses to local stimuli, thus allowing Epulopiscium to maintain its unusually large size. Surveys of the sequences of single-copy genes (dnaA, recA, and ftsZ) revealed genetic homogeneity within a cell consistent with only a small amount ( approximately 1%) of the parental DNA being transferred to the next generation. The results also suggest that the abundance of genome copies in Epulopiscium may allow for an unstable genetic feature, a long mononucleotide tract, in an essential gene. With the evolution of extreme polyploidy and large cell size, Epulopiscium has acquired some of the advantages of eukaryotic cells.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.