Lactobacillus crispatus and Propionibacterium freudenreichii: A Genomic and Transcriptomic View
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Modern DNA sequencing technologies have opened up new possibilities to study bacteria. These methods have not only enabled the characterization of the genetic capacities of bacteria at previously unseen scale but have also provided a wealth of information about bacterial transcriptomes. In this thesis, sequencing and subsequent analysis approaches were applied to study Lactobacillus crispatus and Propionibacterium freudenreichii. Specifically, the aim was to uncover how these two Gram-positive species of human relevance can live in and interact with their environments. L. crispatus is a prominent member of the human vaginal flora and important for urogenital health. In this thesis, an annotated genome sequence was produced for L. crispatus ST1 and analyzed in conjunction with publicly available genome sequences of nine vaginal L. crispatus isolates. The common ortholog groups of the ten isolates captured approximately 57% of the ortholog groups of each isolate and provided a good estimation of the final set of core features of this central urogenital species. Notably, several of the detected L. crispatus core features were of putative relevance to vaginal health. Among these features was a previously characterized adhesin, which was in this thesis identified as a likely antagonist to the harmful vaginal bacterium Gardnerella vaginalis. Altogether, the study revealed a notable functional similarity between the L. crispatus strains and established the role of L. crispatus core proteins in maintaining vaginal health. P. freudenreichii, in turn, is an industrially important dairy culture. In this thesis, the cheese starter P. freudenreichii ssp. shermanii JS was subjected to transcriptome and genome sequencing to gain a deeper understanding of the role of this bacterium in industrial cheese ripening. The genome of strain JS encoded several enzymes and metabolic pathways involved in the formation of flavor compounds and was highly similar to those of the other P. freudenreichii strains. Transcriptome analysis of industrial cheese samples revealed nearly 15% of the 2,377 protein-coding genes of strain JS to be significantly differentially expressed between the warm and cold room ripening of cheese. Several of the flavor-associated genes exhibited higher expression levels in the warm compared to the cold room samples, corroborating the hypothesis that P. freudenreichii contributes more to the cheese flavor development during warm than cold room ripening. Automated function prediction of bacterial protein sequences greatly facilitated the genomics investigations of L. crispatus and P. freudenreichii in this thesis, providing functional descriptions for a majority of the predicted coding sequences of strains ST1 and JS. Moreover, re-annotation of the coding sequences of the nine publicly available vaginal L. crispatus isolates significantly increased the portion of the L. crispatus coding sequences with functional descriptions in the comparative genomics study of L. crispatus. The different methods varied in their prediction capabilities and were often complementary, supporting the use of more than one function prediction method in a bacterial genome project. Moreover, extremely strict thresholds in the homology searches were noted to unnecessarily restrict the pool of hits available for annotation transfer, hampering both the annotation quality and the fraction of coding sequences with a functional classification. Taken together, the utilized sequencing approaches coupled with suitable downstream analyses proved effective in deciphering the physiology of lactobacilli and propionibacteria and offered novel insights into the health-promoting properties of L. crispatus and flavor-forming capabilities of P. freudenreichii.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Teija Ojala
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2220070554