Pan-Genome Portrait of Bacillus mycoides Provides Insights into the Species Ecology and Evolution

Abstract

Bacillus mycoides is poorly known despite its frequent occurrence in a wide variety of environments. To provide direct insight into its ecology and evolutionary history, a comparative investigation of the species pan-genome and the functional gene categorization of 35 isolates obtained from soil samples from northeastern Poland was performed. The pan-genome of these isolates is composed of 20,175 genes and is characterized by a strong predominance of adaptive genes (∼83%), a significant amount of plasmid genes (∼37%), and a great contribution of prophages and insertion sequences. The pan-genome structure and phylodynamic studies had suggested a wide genomic diversity among the isolates, but no correlation between lineages and the bacillus origin was found. Nevertheless, the two B. mycoides populations, one from Białowieża National Park, the last European natural primeval forest with soil classified as organic, and the second from mineral soil samples taken in a farm in Jasienówka, a place with strong anthropogenic pressure, differ significantly in the frequency of genes encoding proteins enabling bacillus adaptation to specific stress conditions and production of a set of compounds, thus facilitating their colonization of various ecological niches. Furthermore, differences in the prevalence of essential stress sigma factors might be an important trail of this process. Due to these numerous adaptive genes, B. mycoides is able to quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions.