Census of Prokaryotic Senses

Census of prokaryotic senses.

Census of solo LuxR genes in prokaryotic genomes

luxR genes encode transcriptional regulators that control acyl homoserine lactone-based quorum sensing (AHL QS) in Gram negative bacteria. On the bacterial chromosome, luxR genes are usually found next or near to a luxI gene encoding the AHL signal synthase. Recently, a number of luxR genes were described that have no luxI genes in their vicinity on the chromosome. These so-called solo luxR gen...

Towards a highly efficient diversity census of the prokaryotic biosphere: a group testing approach

Exploring the microbial biosphere has grown exponentially in recent years, although we are far from understanding its entirety. We present the "diversity census" problem of exploring all bacterial species in a large cohort of specimens, and detecting a specimen that contains each species (see Figure 1). The naive approach to this problem is to sequence each specimen, thus requiring costly sampl...

Towards a highly e cient diversity census of the prokaryotic biosphere: a group testing approach

Technological advancements in recent years have elucidated the extent of the microbial “dark matter”. Replacing culturebased profiling by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) methods paved the way to exploring the microbial content in di↵erent niches. However, we are far from capturing the microbial diversity across the prokaryotic biosphere, whose estimated size varies between 106 species [1] to a...

ComQXPA Quorum Sensing Systems May Not Be Unique to Bacillus subtilis: A Census in Prokaryotic Genomes

The comQXPA locus of Bacillus subtilis encodes a quorum sensing (QS) system typical of Gram positive bacteria. It encodes four proteins, the ComQ isoprenyl transferase, the ComX pre-peptide signal, the ComP histidine kinase, and the ComA response regulator. These are encoded by four adjacent genes all situated on the same chromosome strand. Here we present results of a comprehensive census of c...