lectures 1-3 Flashcards
(78 cards)
Checklist for mutualism:
1) Removal of one partner leads to death or reduced growth of the other
2) The genomes of each species show advanced degeneration
3) Products produced by one partner are utilized by the other – often both ways
Mutualism example
fungus + alga
Synergism example
cow rumen microbiome
Checklist for synergism:
1) Each partner benefits from the other
2) Partners can be easily (?) separated and grown independently of each other
Commensalism example
Beggiatoa and other sulfur spring microbes
Checklist for commensalism:
1) One species benefits
2) The other species is neither harmed nor benefitted by
the interaction
Amensalism example
Streptomyces and other soil bacteria
Checklist for amensalism:
1) One species benefits
2) The other species is harmed by the
interaction
3) The interaction is non-specific
Parasitism example
amebas and human lung macrophages
Checklist for parasitism:
1) One species benefits
2) The other species is harmed by the
interaction
3) The interaction is specific, and
usually obligatory for the parasite
Mammalian macrophages and Acanthamoeba display striking
similarities in the molecular mechanisms involved in (5):
- Directional motility
- Recognition
- Binding
- Engulfment
- Phagolysosome processing of bacteria
insect species that are infected by
intracellular bacteria are called…
endosymbionts
In nature, microbes are almost never found as…
single species ecosystems
microbiomes (2)
- Microbial collectives
- Can contain bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and viruses; often contain members of all of these.
3 main questions of the microbiomes
- 1) Who is there?
- 2) What are they doing?
- 3) How do they respond to different conditions?
Who is there?
* We can determine this using several methods (3):
1) Culture
2) DNA sequencing
3) RNA sequencing
High-throughput culture or ‘culturomics’:
- Reduces labour intensity by using AI & robots
- Allows culture under hundreds of different conditions
- Allows picking of thousands of colonies into multi-well plates
two types of DNA sequencing
A) Amplicon sequencing
B) Metagenomic (‘shotgun’) sequencing
Amplicon sequencing (2)
- A target gene is amplified, barcoded and sequenced
- Most common method amplifies regions from the 16S rRNA gene from bacteria,
a taxonomic marker
Metagenomic (‘shotgun’) sequencing
- The extracted gDNA is broken up into bits (or not, depending on sequencing
method), barcoded and directly sequenced - A computer is used to pull out signature genes from the sequenced pool
Both methods can reveal _____, or the species richness, evenness and _____ in the sample
‘alpha diversity’, ‘dominance’
RNA sequencing/ ‘RNA-seq’ (4)
- Extract the RNA (mRNA) from a community
- Transcribe to DNA (using a viral reverse transcriptase enzyme)
- (or not, depending on the sequence method)
- Barcode and sequence
- Match transcripts to known genomes