Februray 21st 2008

Iggy Mavor and Garon Coriz

More MetaGenomics but this time in Microbial Mats

while we enjoy drinks from Laurel and Rachel we will discuss the following papers and have an introduction to the researchers by Laila and Margaret.

Bahaya, d., Grossman, A.R., Steunou, A.S., Khuri, N., Cohan, F.M., Hamamura, N., Melendrez, M.C., Bateson, M.M., Ward, D.M., Heidelberg, J.F. (2007) Population levle functional diversity in a microbial community revealed by comparative genomic and metagenomic analyses. The ISME Journal 1:703-713.

Foerstner KU, von Mering C, Bork P (2006) Comparative analysis of environmental sequences: potential and challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 361(1467): 519-523.

 

Clean up from last week

Iggy was distraught at his inability to come up with the rate of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria, so he did some research and found some facts and some references.

According to Dutta and Pan (2002) horozontal gene transfer (HGT) happens in E.coli at a rate of 16kb/Milliion years, or 1600 kb scince the species diverged. While this number might seem insignificant, Davis and Zhang (2008) sugest that 10-40% of the protein coding genes in E. coli were horizontally transfered. Basically HGT is extremely important in an evolutionary scale where infrequent events in populations of 109 bacteria will interact over millions of years. However, this rate is perhaps not cause for serious concern about the potential to create new pathogens when working with antibiotic resistance genes from soil bacteria.