Excavating the Functional Landscape of Bacterial Cells

摘要

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.