Prochlorococcus have low global mutation rate and small effective population size

Prochlorococcus are the most abundant free-living photosynthetic carbon-fixing organisms in the ocean. Prochlorococcus show small genome sizes, low genomic G+C content, reduced DNA repair gene pool and fast evolutionary rates, which are typical features of endosymbiotic bacteria. Nevertheless, their evolutionary mechanisms are believed to be different. Evolution of endosymbiotic bacteria is dominated by genetic drift owing to repeated population bottlenecks, whereas Prochlorococcus are postulated to have extremely large effective population sizes (N_e) and thus drift has rarely been considered. However, accurately extrapolating N_e requires measuring an unbiased global mutation rate through mutation accumulation, which is challenging for Prochlorococcus. Here, we managed this experiment over 1,065 days using Prochlorococcus marinus AS9601, sequenced genomes of 141 mutant lines and determined its mutation rate to be 3.50 × 10^-10 per site per generation. Extrapolating N_e additionally requires identifying population boundaries, which we defined using PopCOGenT and over 400 genomes related to AS9601. Accordingly, we calculated its N_e to be 1.68 × 10⁷, which is only reasonably greater than that of endosymbiotic bacteria but surprisingly smaller than that of many free-living bacteria extrapolated using the same approach. Our results therefore suggest that genetic drift is a key driver of Prochlorococcus evolution.