Abstract
Cyanobacteria are physiologically and morphologically diverse photosynthetic microbes that play major roles in the carbon and nitrogen cycles of the biosphere. Recently, they have gained attention as potential platforms for the production of biofuels and other renewable chemicals. Many cyanobacteria were characterized morphologically prior to the advent of genome sequencing. Here, we catalog cyanobacterial ultrastructure within the context of genomic sequence information, including high-magnification transmission electron micrographs that represent the diversity in cyanobacterial morphology. We place the image data in the context of tabulated protein domains—which are the structural, functional, and evolutionary units of proteins—from the 126 cyanobacterial genomes comprising the CyanoGEBA dataset. In particular, we identify the correspondence between ultrastructure and the occurrence of genes encoding protein domains related to the formation of cyanobacterial inclusions. This compilation of images and genome-level domain occurrence will prove useful for a variety of analyses of cyanobacterial sequence data and provides a guidebook to morphological features.
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Acknowledgments
The authors dedicate this article to the memory of Dr. David Knaff who encouraged its development as an online guidebook to cyanobacterial (subcellular) morphology. CRG-E would like to acknowledge members of the Kerfeld laboratory for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy DE-FG02-91ER20021 and with infrastructure support from MSU AgBIO research (CAK and CRG-E).
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R. Rippka and G. Guglielmi have both retired
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Gonzalez-Esquer, C.R., Smarda, J., Rippka, R. et al. Cyanobacterial ultrastructure in light of genomic sequence data. Photosynth Res 129, 147–157 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-016-0286-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11120-016-0286-2