Premium
The decoupling between genetic structure and metabolic phenotypes in Escherichia coli leads to continuous phenotypic diversity
Author(s) -
SABARLY V.,
BOUVET O.,
GLODT J.,
CLERMONT O.,
SKURNIK D.,
DIANCOURT L.,
De VIENNE D.,
DENAMUR E.,
DILLMANN C.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of evolutionary biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.289
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1420-9101
pISSN - 1010-061X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02287.x
Subject(s) - biology , phenotype , genetics , escherichia coli , phylogenetics , gene , genetic diversity , evolutionary biology , population , demography , sociology
To assess the extent of intra‐species diversity and the links between phylogeny, lifestyle (habitat and pathogenicity) and phenotype, we assayed the growth yield on 95 carbon sources of 168 Escherichia strains. We also correlated the growth capacities of 14 E. coli strains with the presence/absence of enzyme‐coding genes. Globally, we found that the genetic distance, based on multilocus sequence typing data, was a weak indicator of the metabolic phenotypic distance. Besides, lifestyle and phylogroup had almost no impact on the growth yield of non‐ Shigella E. coli strains. In these strains, the presence/absence of the metabolic pathways, which was linked to the phylogeny, explained most of the growth capacities. However, few discrepancies blurred the link between metabolic phenotypic distance and metabolic pathway distance. This study shows that a prokaryotic species structured into well‐defined genetic and lifestyle groups can yet exhibit continuous phenotypic diversity, possibly caused by gene regulatory effects.