Abstract
This work introduces Waterburya agarophytonicola Bonthond and Shalygin gen. nov., sp. nov, a baeocyte producing cyanobacterium that was isolated from the rhodophyte Agarophyton vermiculophyllum (Ohmi) Gurgel et al., an invasive seaweed that has spread across the northern hemisphere. The new species genome reveals a diverse repertoire of chemotaxis and adhesion related genes, including genes coding for type IV pili assembly proteins and a high number of genes coding for filamentous hemagglutinin family (FHA) proteins. Among a genetic basis for the synthesis of siderophores, carotenoids and numerous vitamins, W. agarophytonicola is potentially capable of producing cobalamin (vitamin B12), for which A. vermiculophyllum is an auxotroph. With a taxonomic description of the genus and species and a draft genome, this study provides as a basis for future research, to uncover the nature of this geographically independent association between seaweed and cyanobiont.
Highlights
Since the inception of the holobiosis concept by Meyer-Abich (1934) and the term ‘holobiont’ was coined by Margulis (1990), our view of multicellular organisms has changed
The aim of the present work was to isolate, describe and sequence the genome of the pleurocapsalean cyanobacterium that clustered in Bonthond et al (2020) into the core operational taxonomic unit (OTU) associated with A. vermiculophyllum, to gain insight to its putative functional roles in the seaweed holobiont
The most abundant OTU from Bonthond et al 2020, which closely related to W. agarophytonicola, constitutes on average 7.37% of all amplicon reads in tissue samples and represents 4.68% of the reads in samples taken from the algal surface
Summary
Since the inception of the holobiosis concept by Meyer-Abich (1934) and the term ‘holobiont’ was coined by Margulis (1990), our view of multicellular organisms has changed. New taxonomic descriptions and epitypifications are needed to achieve this and to upgrade the available reference records (e.g., SILVA; Quast et al 2013, RefSeq; O’Leary et al 2016) on which amplicon and metagenome sequencing approaches rely. While these culture-independent studies are on the one hand limited by the substantial number of unknown reads, they can at the same time help to point in which direction relevant and undescribed species may be found
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