School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501, USA.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2011 Jan;26(1):38-44. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2010.10.006. Epub 2010 Nov 18.
The new field of 'stoichiogenomics' integrates evolution, ecology and bioinformatics to reveal surprising patterns of the differential usage of key elements [e.g. nitrogen (N)] in proteins and nucleic acids. Because the canonical amino acids as well as nucleotides differ in element counts, natural selection owing to limited element supplies might bias monomer usage to reduce element costs. For example, proteins that respond to N limitation in microbes use a lower proportion of N-rich amino acids, whereas proteome- and transcriptome-wide element contents differ significantly for plants as compared with animals, probably because of the differential severity of element limitations. In this review, we show that with these findings, new directions for future investigations are emerging, particularly via the increasing availability of diverse metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data sets.
“化学生态基因组学”这一新领域融合了进化、生态和生物信息学，揭示了在蛋白质和核酸中关键元素（如氮 (N)）的使用存在惊人差异的模式。由于组成蛋白质的标准氨基酸和核苷酸在元素数量上存在差异，因此由于元素供应有限而产生的自然选择可能会偏向于单体的使用，以降低元素成本。例如，微生物中对 N 限制有反应的蛋白质使用较少的富氮氨基酸，而与动物相比，植物的蛋白质组和转录组的元素含量差异显著，这可能是由于元素限制的严重程度不同。在这篇综述中，我们表明，随着这些发现的出现，未来的研究出现了新的方向，特别是随着多样化的宏基因组和宏转录组数据集的日益普及。
