ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2016
Indispensability of Horizontally Transferred Genes and Its Impact on Bacterial Genome Streamlining.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Firewalled synthetic commensal blocks horizontal gene transfer in the gut.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cas3-mediated genome reduction: demonstration in Cupriavidus necator H16 improves growth on heterotrophic and autotrophic carbon sources.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Time Series Data Mining for Linking the Shape of Bacterial Growth Curves to Biological Functions.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Article
- Plasmid transmission dynamics and evolution of partner quality in a natural population ofmBio · 2025Article
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- Evolution recovers the fitness of Acinetobacter baylyi strains with large deletions through mutations in deletion-specific targets and global post-transcriptional regulators.PLoS genetics · 2024Article
- Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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- Review
- Article
- Review
- Engineering resource allocation in artificially minimized cells: Is genome reduction the best strategy?Microbial biotechnology · 2023Article
- Greedy reduction of Bacillus subtilis genome yields emergent phenotypes of high resistance to a DNA damaging agent and low evolvability.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- Mutations identified in engineeredFrontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Growth rate-associated transcriptome reorganization in response to genomic, environmental, and evolutionary interruptions.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Experimental Evolution Expands the Breadth of Adaptation to an Environmental Gradient Correlated With Genome Reduction.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Contribution of the genomic and nutritional differentiation to the spatial distribution of bacterial colonies.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Random genome reduction coupled with polyhydroxybutyrate biosynthesis to facilitate its accumulation inFrontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2022Article
- Global coordination of the mutation and growth rates across the genetic and nutritional variety inFrontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Why are certain bacterial genomes so small and compact? The adaptive genome streamlining hypothesis posits that selection acts to reduce genome size because of the metabolic burden of replicating DNA. To reveal the impact of genome streamlining on cellular traits, we reduced the Escherichia coli genome by up to 20% by deleting regions which have been repeatedly subjects of horizontal transfer in nature. Unexpectedly, horizontally transferred genes not only confer utilization of specific nutrients and elevate tolerance to stresses, but also allow efficient usage of resources to build new cells, and hence influence fitness in routine and stressful environments alike. Genome reduction affected fitness not only by gene loss, but also by induction of a general stress response. Finally, we failed to find evidence that the advantage of smaller genomes would be due to a reduced metabolic burden of replicating DNA or a link with smaller cell size. We conclude that as the potential energetic benefit gained by deletion of short genomic segments is vanishingly small compared with the deleterious side effects of these deletions, selection for reduced DNA synthesis costs is unlikely to shape the evolution of small genomes.
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