Diversity and ecology of the prokaryotic mobilome.

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are genetic elements that can move around within genomes or between cells. It is known that MGEs play a crucial role in prokaryotic ecology and evolution. However, due to limitations of current MGE detection tools in prokaryotic genomes, the full size and diversity of the prokaryotic mobilome is unknown, as well as the extent to which MGEs interact. In addition, current knowledge on the host range of various types of MGEs is limited. This project aims to explore the full mobilome of the important orders Lactobacillales and Enterobacterales, two taxa that are densely sampled in terms of the number of strains with sequenced genomes in public databases. First, a novel tool will be developed that can predict the full mobilome of a set of genomes in a database-independent manner, based on comparative genomics. Second, this tool, as well as existing MGE prediction tools, will be applied to both taxa. The predicted MGEs will be clustered, and presence/absence correlations between the resulting clusters will be determined to assess interactions between the elements. Third, the co-evolutionary history of MGE clusters and their host genomes will be explored and ancestral MGE transfer events inferred. Finally, the host clades of the MGEs will be predicted and validated through CRISPR spacer matching. Together, these analyses will yield new insights into the "dark matter" of the prokaryotic mobilome.

Keywords:GENOMICS, LACTOBACILLUS, EVOLUTION, BIOINFORMATICS

Disciplines:Computational evolutionary biology, comparative genomics and population genomics, Development of bioinformatics software, tools and databases, Molecular evolution, Phylogeny and comparative analysis, Bacteriology