Centre for Environmental Technology and Engineering, Massey University, Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Curr Opin Biotechnol. 2012 Jun;23(3):467-73. doi: 10.1016/j.copbio.2011.12.022. Epub 2012 Jan 7.
Although versatile microorganisms are critical in industrial applications where the ability to cope with change and carry out complex tasks is needed, very little is in fact known about the evolutionary and ecological meanings of versatility in prokaryotes. Testing the hypothesis that a large genome size is a prerequisite for versatility in prokaryotes, we found that putatively versatile prokaryotes are phylogenetically and ecologically diverse and indeed include many well known and commercially relevant versatile microorganisms. Despite individual differences in metabolic abilities, a common trait of large-genome prokaryotes appears that they have gained their large genomes as an evolutionary response to nutrient-scarce and/or variable environments. This insight seriously questions the ability of traditional microbiology methods to isolate versatile prokaryotes and casts doubt on the ecological relevance of knowledge based on the study of specialists.
尽管多功能微生物在需要应对变化和执行复杂任务的工业应用中至关重要，但实际上对于原核生物多功能性的进化和生态意义知之甚少。为了检验基因组较大是原核生物多功能性的先决条件这一假设，我们发现推测的多功能原核生物在系统发育和生态上具有多样性，实际上包括许多众所周知且具有商业相关性的多功能微生物。尽管代谢能力存在个体差异，但大型基因组原核生物的一个共同特征是，它们的大型基因组是作为对营养匮乏和/或多变环境的进化反应而获得的。这一见解严重质疑了传统微生物学方法分离多功能原核生物的能力，并对基于专门研究的知识的生态相关性提出了质疑。
