1. Insights Obtained by Culturing Saccharibacteria With Their Bacterial Hosts
- Author
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Christopher D Johnston, Thao T. To, Felicitas B. Bidlack, Andrew J Collins, S Balasubramanian, Erik L. Hendrickson, Joseph K. Bedree, Wenyuan Shi, Xuesong He, Batbileg Bor, Pallavi P Murugkar, Floyd E. Dewhirst, and Jeffrey S. McLean
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Genetics ,Mouth ,Bacteria ,Phylum ,Lineage (evolution) ,Microbiota ,030106 microbiology ,Genomics ,Research Reports ,Biology ,biology.organism_classification ,Genome ,Actinobacteria ,03 medical and health sciences ,030104 developmental biology ,Actinomyces ,Humans ,Oral Microbiome ,General Dentistry ,Genome, Bacterial ,In Situ Hybridization, Fluorescence ,Synteny - Abstract
Oral microbiome research has moved from asking “Who’s there?” to “What are they doing?” Understanding what microbes “do” involves multiple approaches, including obtaining genomic information and examining the interspecies interactions. Recently we isolated a human oral Saccharibacteria (TM7) bacterium, HMT-952, strain TM7x, which is an ultrasmall parasite of the oral bacterium Actinomyces odontolyticus. The host-parasite interactions, such as phage-bacterium or Saccharibacteria–host bacterium, are understudied areas with large potential for insight. The Saccharibacteria phylum is a member of Candidate Phyla Radiation, a large lineage previously devoid of cultivated members. However, expanding our understanding of Saccharibacteria-host interactions requires examining multiple phylogenetically distinct Saccharibacteria-host pairs. Here we report the isolation of 3 additional Saccharibacteria species from the human oral cavity in binary coculture with their bacterial hosts. They were obtained by filtering ultrasmall Saccharibacteria cells free of other larger bacteria and inoculating them into cultures of potential host bacteria. The binary cocultures obtained could be stably passaged and studied. Complete closed genomes were obtained and allowed full genome analyses. All have small genomes (
- Published
- 2020