Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
Biodiversity Unit, University of Turku, Finland.
J Hazard Mater. 2021 Apr 15;408:124556. doi: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.124556. Epub 2020 Nov 14.
Glyphosate is the most common broad-spectrum herbicide. It targets the key enzyme of the shikimate pathway, 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), which synthesizes three essential aromatic amino acids (phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan) in plants. Because the shikimate pathway is also found in many prokaryotes and fungi, the widespread use of glyphosate may have unsuspected impacts on the diversity and composition of microbial communities, including the human gut microbiome. Here, we introduce the first bioinformatics method to assess the potential sensitivity of organisms to glyphosate based on the type of EPSPS enzyme. We have precomputed a dataset of EPSPS sequences from thousands of species that will be an invaluable resource to advancing the research field. This novel methodology can classify sequences from nearly 90% of eukaryotes and >80% of prokaryotes. A conservative estimate from our results shows that 54% of species in the core human gut microbiome are sensitive to glyphosate.
草甘膦是最常见的广谱除草剂。它靶向植物中莽草酸途径的关键酶 5-烯醇丙酮酰莽草酸-3-磷酸合酶（EPSPS），该酶合成三种必需的芳香族氨基酸（苯丙氨酸、酪氨酸和色氨酸）。由于莽草酸途径也存在于许多原核生物和真菌中，草甘膦的广泛使用可能对微生物群落的多样性和组成产生意想不到的影响，包括人类肠道微生物组。在这里，我们介绍了第一种基于 EPSPS 酶类型评估生物体对草甘膦潜在敏感性的生物信息学方法。我们已经预先计算了来自数千个物种的 EPSPS 序列数据集，这将成为推进该研究领域的宝贵资源。这种新方法可以对近 90%的真核生物和>80%的原核生物的序列进行分类。我们的结果保守估计显示，核心人类肠道微生物组中 54%的物种对草甘膦敏感。
