Global within-species phylogenetics of sewage microbes suggest that local adaptation shapes geographical bacterial clustering

Marie Louise Jespersen, Patrick Munk, Joachim Johansen, Rolf Sommer Kaas, Henry Webel, Håkan Vigre, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, Simon Rasmussen, Frank M. Aarestrup*

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Most investigations of geographical within-species differences are limited to focusing on a single species. Here, we investigate global differences for multiple bacterial species using a dataset of 757 metagenomics sewage samples from 101 countries worldwide. The within-species variations were determined by performing genome reconstructions, and the analyses were expanded by gene focused approaches. Applying these methods, we recovered 3353 near complete (NC) metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) encompassing 1439 different MAG species and found that within-species genomic variation was in 36% of the investigated species (12/33) coherent with regional separation. Additionally, we found that variation of organelle genes correlated less with geography compared to metabolic and membrane genes, suggesting that the global differences of these species are caused by regional environmental selection rather than dissemination limitations. From the combination of the large and globally distributed dataset and in-depth analysis, we present a wide investigation of global within-species phylogeny of sewage bacteria. The global differences found here emphasize the need for worldwide data sets when making global conclusions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number700
JournalCommunications Biology
Volume6
Number of pages9
ISSN2399-3642
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

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