Abstract
Sulfolobus islandicus is a model microorganism in the TACK superphylum of the Archaea, a key lineage in the evolutionary history of cells. Here we report a genome-wide identification of the repertoire of genes essential to S. islandicus growth in culture. We confirm previous targeted gene knockouts, uncover the non-essentiality of functions assumed to be essential to the Sulfolobus cell, including the proteinaceous S-layer, and highlight essential genes whose functions are yet to be determined. Phyletic distributions illustrate the potential transitions that may have occurred during the evolution of this archaeal microorganism, and highlight sets of genes that may have been associated with each transition. We use this comparative context as a lens to focus future research on archaea-specific uncharacterized essential genes that may provide valuable insights into the evolutionary history of cells.
Highlights
Sulfolobus islandicus is a model microorganism in the TACK superphylum of the Archaea, a key lineage in the evolutionary history of cells
We find that the surface layer (S-layer) protein, which is present in most cells in the archaeal domain[22], is not essential in this model organism
We established three independent genome-wide disruption libraries in an agmatine-auxotrophic strain of S. islandicus M.16.4 by using a modified in vitro transposon mutagenesis system derived from Tn5 (Epicentre, USA)
Summary
Sulfolobus islandicus is a model microorganism in the TACK superphylum of the Archaea, a key lineage in the evolutionary history of cells. As a step in that direction, we take here a genome-wide functional approach to define 441 genes essential to the growth of Sulfolobus islandicus. We can readily obtain cdvB3 disruption mutants (Supplementary Fig. 3b) and the growth of a cdvB3 mutant strain is indistinguishable from the wild-type strain (data not shown), this gene was removed from the essential gene list.
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