Co-evolution of cyanophage and cyanobacteria in Antarctic lakes: Adaptive responses to high UV flux and global warming

摘要

Rapid adaptation to acute environmental change demands co-evolution of indigenous viral populations and their hosts. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a highly efficient adaptive mechanism, but a difficult phenomena to dectect. The mosaic nature of bacteriophage genomes resulting from HGT has generally been explored using phylogenetic analysis of coding regions [1,2]. Focusing on the proteome certainly provides one window into the origin and evolution of genome information storage. However, the original fitness function for a nucleotide polymer would arise from a more primal survival imperative predating the appearance of a coding function. Multivariate analysis of a genome information storage metric (lossless compression [4, 5] ), nucleotide distributions, and distributions of the three major physiochemical characteristics of the polymer (triple:double bonding [G+C], purine:pyrimidine [G+A], and keto:amine [G+T] fractions) produces a metric to detect and characterize mosaicism in both coding and non-coding regions of a genome. We discuss possibilities and limitations of using these techniques to investigate HGT and the origins and evolution of genome complexity. Analysis of available virus (n= 2374) and bacteriophage genomes (n=417) indicates these probes can perform whole-genome taxonomy tasks or sliding window searches for evidence of HGT in a single genome. HGT responses may serve as a canary or bell-weather for global environmental change. We discuss one area of application of considerable interest to our institute: the response of cyanophage and their cyanobacteria hosts to variations in ultraviolet solar flux in geographically isolated Antarctic lakes.