Title

Genomic adaptation of prokaryotic organisms at high temperature

Authors

Surajit Basak¹, Pamela Mukhopadhyay², Sanjib Kumar Gupta², Tapash Chandra Ghosh^1*

Affiliation

¹Biomedical Informatics Center, National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, P-33, C.I.T Road, Scheme-XM, Beliaghata, Kolkata-700010, India; ²Bioinformatics Centre, Bose Institute, P 1/12, C.I.T. Scheme VII M -Kolkata 700054- India

Email

tapash@bic.boseinst.ernet.in

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received November, 5 2009; Accepted November, 15 2009; Published February 28, 2010

Abstract

One of the central issues of evolutionary genomics is to find out the adaptive strategies of microorganisms to stabilize nucleic acid molecules under high temperature. Thermal adaptation hypothesis gives a link between G+C content and growth temperature if there is a considerable variation of guanine and cytosine content between species. However, there has been a long-standing debate regarding the correlations between genomic GC content and optimal growth temperature (Topt). We urged that adaptation to growth at high temperature requires a coordinated set of evolutionary changes affecting: (i) nucleic acid thermostability and (ii) stability of codon-anticodon interactions. Moreover, in Bacillaceae family we have demonstrated that a higher genomic GC level do not have any role in stabilizing mRNA secondary structure at high growth temperature. Comparative analysis between homologous sequences of thermophilic Thermus thermophilus and mesophilic Deinococcus radiodurans suggests that increased levels of GC contents in the coding sequence corresponding to strand structure of Thermus thermophilus genes have stabilizing effect on the mRNA secondary structure, whereas increased levels of GC contents in coding sequences corresponding to aperiodic structure have destabilizing effect on the mRNA secondary structure. In this perspective, a critical review of thermal adaptation hypothesis is further advocated.

Citation

Basak et al, Bioinformation 4(8): 352-356 (2010)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.