Abstract

The marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus MED4 has the smallest sequenced genome of any photosynthetic organism. Prochlorococcus MED4 shares many genomic characteristics with chloroplasts and bacterial endosymbionts, including a reduced coding capacity, missing DNA repair genes, a minimal transcriptional regulatory network, a marked AT% bias, and an accelerated rate of amino acid changes. In chloroplasts and endosymbionts, these molecular phenotypes appear to be symptomatic of a relative increase in genetic drift due to restrictions on effective population size in the host environment. As a free-living bacterium, Prochlorococcus MED4 is not known to be subject to similar ecological constraints. To test whether the high-light-adapted Prochlorococcus MED4 is experiencing a reduction in selection efficiency resulting from genetic drift, we examine two data sets, namely, the environmental genome shotgun sequencing data from the Sargasso Sea and a set of cyanobacterial genome sequences. After integrating these data sets, we compare the evolutionary profile of a high-light Prochlorococcus group to that of a group of Synechococcus (a closely related group of marine cyanobacteria) that does not exhibit a similar small-genome syndrome. The average pairwise dN/dS ratios in the high-light-adapted Prochlorococcus group are significantly lower than those in the Synechococcus group, leading us to reject the hypothesis that the Prochlorococcus group is currently experiencing higher levels of genetic drift.