Unravelling cryptic phosphonate biosynthesis in Chelatococcus asaccharovorans through genome mining

Area of Science:

• Microbiology
• Natural Product Chemistry
• Genomics

Background:

• Phosphonates, natural products with a stable carbon-phosphorus bond, are typically produced by a narrow range of bacteria.
• The biosynthetic pathways and microbial hosts for many phosphonates remain poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the potential for phosphonate biosynthesis in Chelatococcus species through comparative genome mining.
• To identify and characterize phosphonate biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) within Chelatococcus asaccharovorans.

Main Methods:

• Comparative genome mining of four Chelatococcus asaccharovorans strains and related species.
• Utilized antiSMASH for identification of putative phosphonate BGCs.
• Functional annotation of identified genes using BLASTp and conserved domain database analyses.
• Compared identified clusters with the MIBiG database.

Main Results:

• Putative phosphonate BGCs, containing the key C-P bond-forming enzyme phosphoenolpyruvate mutase (PepM), were identified in two of four C. asaccharovorans strains.
• A conserved set of phosphonate biosynthesis genes was found, though cluster architectures varied.
• Identified BGCs showed moderate similarity to known phosphonate pathways but represented novel clusters.
• Phosphonate biosynthetic potential was found to be strain-specific within the analyzed dataset.

Conclusions:

• Chelatococcus asaccharovorans harbors previously unrecognized phosphonate biosynthetic potential.
• The distribution of phosphonate biosynthesis is not uniform across the Chelatococcus genus.
• These findings broaden the phylogenetic scope of phosphonate biosynthesis and offer a basis for discovering novel phosphonate compounds.