Open Access‘Community evolution’ – laboratory strains and pedigrees in the age of genomics
Author(s) -
Matthew J. Dorman,
Nicholas R. Thomson
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.019
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1465-2080
pISSN - 1350-0872
DOI - 10.1099/mic.0.000869
Subject(s) - vibrio cholerae , biology , genetics , genomics , pedigree chart , computational biology , genome , microbiology and biotechnology , bacteria , gene
Molecular microbiologists depend heavily on laboratory strains of bacteria, which are ubiquitous across the community of research groups working on a common organism. However, this presumes that strains present in different laboratories are in fact identical. Work on a culture of Vibrio cholerae preserved from 1916 provoked us to consider recent studies, which have used both classical genetics and next-generation sequencing to study the heterogeneity of laboratory strains. Here, we review and discuss mutations and phenotypic variation in supposedlyisogenic reference strains of V. cholerae and Escherichia coli , and we propose that by virtue of the dissemination of laboratory strains across the world, a large 'community evolution' experiment is currently ongoing.