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Published on: June 14, 2024
Psychrophiles elude genomic prediction of optimal growth temperature
Alexandra Walling1,2, Michael Hoffert3,4, Noah Fierer3,4
1Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA.
Abstract:
While there have been numerous efforts to use genomic information to predict the optimal growth temperatures of bacteria and archaea, such models are often highly inaccurate when applied to taxa with lower optimal growth temperatures, including "cold-loving" psychrophiles. Toki et al. explain why this might be the case, namely, that adaptations to low-temperature growth evolved more recently and are thus less phylogenetically conserved than adaptations to growth at higher temperatures. Leveraging this information about evolutionary history, S. Toki, M. Matsui, K. Tominaga, T. K. Suzuki, et al. (mSystems 11:e00062-26, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00062-26) offer a solution that uses gene presence/absence information instead of models based solely on amino acid composition to predict the optimal growth temperatures of psychrophiles.
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