瑞士苏黎世联邦理工学院Shinichi Sunagawa研究组发现，基因表达的变化和群落的交替差异塑造全球海洋元转录组。2019年11月14日出版的《细胞》发表了这项成果。

研究组展示了来自126个全球分布的采样站的187个转录组和370个基因组的数据库，并建立了一个4,700万个基因的资源，以研究从极到极的跨深度层的群落级转录组。研究人员检查基因表达的变化和群落交替，作为沿着环境变化的这些轴塑造群落转录组的潜在机制，并展示了它们在多种生物地球化学相关过程中个体如何发挥不同功能。此外，他们发现在极地水域，基因表达变化的相对贡献显显著低于非极地水域，并假设在极地地区，响应海洋变暖的群落活动的变化被有机体组成的变化比基因调节机制的驱动更强烈。

据悉，海洋微生物群落强烈影响地球的生物地球化学，食物网和气候。尽管最近在了解其分类学和基因组组成方面取得了进展，但对其转录组在全球范围内如何变化知之甚少。

附：英文原文

Title: Gene Expression Changes and Community Turnover Differentially Shape the Global Ocean Metatranscriptome

Author: Guillem Salazar, Lucas Paoli, Adriana Alberti, Jaime Huerta-Cepas, Hans-Joachim Ruscheweyh, Miguelangel Cuenca, Christopher M. Field, Luis Pedro Coelho, Corinne Cruaud, Stefan Engelen, Ann C. Gregory, Karine Labadie, Claudie Marec, Eric Pelletier, Marta Royo-Llonch, Simon Roux, Pablo Sánchez, Hideya Uehara, Ahmed A. Zayed, Georg Zeller, Margaux Carmichael, Céline Dimier, Joannie Ferland, Stefanie Kandels, Marc Picheral, Sergey Pisarev, Julie Poulain, Silvia G. Acinas, Marcel Babin, Peer Bork, Emmanuel Boss, Chris Bowler, Guy Cochrane, Colomban de Vargas, Michael Follows, Gabriel Gorsky, Nigel Grimsley, Lionel Guidi, Pascal Hingamp, Daniele Iudicone, Olivier Jaillon, Stefanie Kandels-Lewis, Lee Karp-Boss, Eric Karsenti, Fabrice Not, Hiroyuki Ogata, Stephane Pesant, Nicole Poulton, Jeroen Raes, Christian Sardet, Sabrina Speich, Lars Stemmann, Matthew B. Sullivan, Shinichi Sunagawa, Patrick Wincker, Silvia G. Acinas, Marcel Babin, Peer Bork, Chris Bowler, Colomban de Vargas, Lionel Guidi, Pascal Hingamp, Daniele Iudicone, Lee Karp-Boss, Eric Karsenti, Hiroyuki Ogata, Stephane Pesant, Sabrina Speich, Matthew B. Sullivan, Patrick Wincker, Shinichi Sunagawa

Issue&Volume: 2019/11/14

Abstract: Ocean microbial communities strongly influence the biogeochemistry, food webs, and climate of our planet. Despite recent advances in understanding their taxonomic and genomic compositions, little is known about how their transcriptomes vary globally. Here, we present a dataset of 187 metatranscriptomes and 370 metagenomes from 126 globally distributed sampling stations and establish a resource of 47 million genes to study community-level transcriptomes across depth layers from pole-to-pole. We examine gene expression changes and community turnover as the underlying mechanisms shaping community transcriptomes along these axes of environmental variation and show how their individual contributions differ for multiple biogeochemically relevant processes. Furthermore, we find the relative contribution of gene expression changes to be significantly lower in polar than in non-polar waters and hypothesize that in polar regions, alterations in community activity in response to ocean warming will be driven more strongly by changes in organismal composition than by gene regulatory mechanisms.

DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.10.014

Source: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)31164-X