Diversity and evolution of bacterial bioluminescence genes in the global ocean

Thomas Vannier; Pascal Hingamp; Floriane Turrel; Lisa Tanet; Magali Lescot; Youri Timsit

doi:10.1093/nargab/lqaa018

Diversity and evolution of bacterial bioluminescence genes in the global ocean

NAR Genom Bioinform. 2020 Mar 14;2(2):lqaa018. doi: 10.1093/nargab/lqaa018. eCollection 2020 Jun.

Authors

Thomas Vannier^{1

2}, Pascal Hingamp^{1

2}, Floriane Turrel¹, Lisa Tanet¹, Magali Lescot^{1

2}, Youri Timsit^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Aix Marseille Univ, Université de Toulon, CNRS, IRD, MIO UM110, 13288 Marseille, France.
² Research Federation for the study of Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution, FR2022/Tara GOSEE, 3 rue Michel-Ange, 75016 Paris, France.

Abstract

Although bioluminescent bacteria are the most abundant and widely distributed of all light-emitting organisms, the biological role and evolutionary history of bacterial luminescence are still shrouded in mystery. Bioluminescence has so far been observed in the genomes of three families of Gammaproteobacteria in the form of canonical lux operons that adopt the CDAB(F)E(G) gene order. LuxA and luxB encode the two subunits of bacterial luciferase responsible for light-emission. Our deep exploration of public marine environmental databases considerably expands this view by providing a catalog of new lux homolog sequences, including 401 previously unknown luciferase-related genes. It also reveals a broader diversity of the lux operon organization, which we observed in previously undescribed configurations such as CEDA, CAED and AxxCE. This expanded operon diversity provides clues for deciphering lux operon evolution and propagation within the bacterial domain. Leveraging quantitative tracking of marine bacterial genes afforded by planetary scale metagenomic sampling, our study also reveals that the novel lux genes and operons described herein are more abundant in the global ocean than the canonical CDAB(F)E(G) operon.