Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics, Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa.
Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol. 2020;172:135-155. doi: 10.1007/10_2018_83.
Alkalinicity presents a challenge for life due to a "reversed" proton gradient that is unfavourable to many bioenergetic processes across the membranes of microorganisms. Despite this, many bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, collectively termed alkaliphiles, are adapted to life in alkaline ecosystems and are of great scientific and biotechnological interest due to their niche specialization and ability to produce highly stable enzymes. Advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have propelled not only the genomic characterization of many alkaliphilic microorganisms that have been isolated from nature alkaline sources but also our understanding of the functional relationships between different taxa in microbial communities living in these ecosystems. In this review, we discuss the genetics and molecular biology of alkaliphiles from an "omics" point of view, focusing on how metagenomics and transcriptomics have contributed to our understanding of these extremophiles. Graphical Abstract.
堿性环境对生命构成了挑战，因为这种环境中的质子梯度“反转”，不利于微生物膜内的许多生物能量过程。尽管如此，许多细菌、古菌和真核生物，统称为嗜堿生物，已经适应了堿性生态系统中的生活，由于它们的生态位特化和生产高度稳定酶的能力，它们具有重要的科学和生物技术意义。下一代测序技术的进步不仅推动了从自然界堿性来源中分离出的许多嗜堿微生物的基因组特征描述，也增进了我们对这些生态系统中微生物群落中不同分类群之间功能关系的理解。在这篇综述中，我们从“组学”的角度讨论了嗜堿生物的遗传学和分子生物学，重点介绍了宏基因组学和转录组学如何帮助我们理解这些极端微生物。
