Excavating the Functional Landscape of Bacterial Cells
Excavating the Functional Landscape of Bacterial Cells
复制标题
挖掘细菌细胞的功能景观
作者：
H. Ochman;Rahul Raghavan
功能分析的减少细菌基因组的复杂性和控制水平，以前被认为是限制在真核生物。有一张海报描绘了模式细菌大肠杆菌的代谢途径，我们的实验室将其作为参考，将每个新的细菌基因组序列转换为编码功能的图谱。这是一个特别令人满意的奋进，并已被最好地应用于那些高度减少的基因组含有大肠杆菌中的基因子集的宿主依赖性细菌。大肠杆菌：如果一个特定的基因或途径被侵蚀或缺失，则假定细菌在该活性方面存在缺陷，并且在其当前环境中不再需要该性状。然而，这种基因功能的线性映射很少考虑细胞实际上是如何完成它保留的过程的。基因被简单地看作是执行一个特定的功能，尽管有许多内部和外部因素可能会影响他们的执行。本期的三篇论文--Güell等人在第1268（1）页，Yus等人在第1263（2）页，Kühner等人在第1235（3）页--报道了转录控制和蛋白质组织的特征，这些特征比以前认为的细菌中可能存在的特征要微妙和复杂得多，在许多方面与真核生物的机制相似。
Functional analyses of a reduced bacterial genome suggest levels of complexity and control previously assumed to be restricted to eukaryotes. There is a poster that charts the metabolic pathways of the model bacterium Escherichia coli, and our laboratory uses it as a reference to convert each new bacterial genome sequence into an atlas of encoded functions. This is a particularly satisfying endeavor and has been best applied to those host-dependent bacteria whose highly reduced genomes contain a subset of the genes in E. coli: If a particular gene or pathway is eroded or absent, it is assumed that the bacterium is deficient in that activity and no longer has a need for the trait in its current circumstances. However, this linear mapping of genes to function rarely considers how a cell actually accomplishes the processes it has retained. Genes are viewed simply as performing a specified function despite the many internal and external factors that might affect their implementation. Three papers in this issue—by Güell et al. on page 1268 (1), Yus et al. on page 1263 (2), and Kühner et al. on page 1235 (3)—report features of transcriptional control and protein organization that are much more subtle and intricate than were previously considered possible in bacteria, and in many ways, appear similar to mechanisms in eukaryotes.
影响因子：
7
作者：
Kuo, Chih-Horng;Moran, Nancy A.;Ochman, Howard
通讯作者：
Ochman, Howard