Gene rescue following frame shift mutation in endosymbiont bacteria: rare or common?: Musaddiq Lodi

Описание: Musaddiq Lodi, Bret M. Boyd
Center for Biological Data Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 23284

Presented at NURVa Conference hosted at Hampden-Sydney College on February 12th, 2022.

Abstract:
Endosymbiont bacteria are subject to a phenomena known as Muller’s Ratchet where they can acquire, but not remove deleterious mutations from their genome; however, other mechanisms have arised in order to purge harmful mutations from endosymbiotic bacterial genomes. One such of these mechanisms is known as polymerase “slippage”, in which polymerase does not translate tracts of identical bases correctly, leading to a gene being “rescued” despite initially being out of frame. In this study we sought to find evolutionary evidence of polymerase slippage in endosymbiotic lice head louse bacteria using bioinformatic methods. We have seen that there is conservation of genes with polyA tracts present amongst various head louse bacteria. This suggests that polymerase slippage is a rescue function used in this particular lineage of endosymbiotic head louse bacteria.