Pan-genome Analysis of the Genus Serratia

TL;DR

This study conducts a comprehensive pan-genome analysis of the genus Serratia, revealing genetic diversity, core and dispensable genes, and genomic variations across 100 strains from diverse environments.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive pan-genome analysis of Serratia, highlighting genome heterogeneity and evolutionary insights at the genus level.

Findings

Only 5% of genes are core genes across all strains.

Over half of the genes are dispensable or strain-specific.

Genomic variations include insertions, inversions, deletions, and duplications.

Abstract

Pan-genome analysis is a standard procedure to decipher genome heterogeneity and diversification of bacterial species. Specie evolution is traced by defining and comparing the core (conserved), accessory (dispensable) and unique (strain-specific) gene pool with other strains of interest. Here, we present pan-genome analysis of the genus Serratia, comprising of a dataset of 100 genomes. The isolates have clinical to environmental origin and consist of ten different species from the genus, along with two subspecies of the representative strain Serratia marcescens. Out of 19430 non-redundant coding DNA sequences (CDS) from the dataset, 972 (5%) belonged to the core genome. Majority of these genes were linked to metabolic function, followed by cellular processes/signalling, information storage/processing while rest of them were poorly characterized. 10,135 CDSs (52.16%) were associated with dispensible genome while 8,321 CDSs (42.82%) were singletons or strain specific. The Pan-genome orthologs indicated a positive correlation to the number of genomes whereas negative correlation was obtained for core genome. Genomes were aligned to obtain information about synteny, insertion/inversion, deletion and duplications. This study provides insights into variation of Serratia species and paves way for pan-genome analysis of other bacterial species at genus level.