Fig. 5: Diversity, structure, genomic location, and expression dynamics of putative NRP/PKS encoded by bdelloid rotifers.
From: Bdelloid rotifers deploy horizontally acquired biosynthetic genes against a fungal pathogen
a Phylogeny of NRP/PKS coding sequences (CDS) based on aligning the condensation domain to selected sequences from other kingdoms. Components of selected bacterial and fungal antimicrobial biosynthesis pathways are named for reference, together with Nrps-1 and Pks-1, which synthesise neuron-associated molecules in Caenorhabditis elegans. Other examples of animal NRP/PKS include a springtail (Folsomia candida), mollusc (Lottia gigantea), lancelet (Brachiostoma belcheri) and sea star (Patiria miniata). Shading and symbols for bdelloid copies correspond to the expression dynamics at T24 (panel e). The ‘upregulated clade’ in blue dashed lines comprises 11 CDS from A. ricciae and 1 from A. vaga. The other upregulated A. vaga CDS (asterisk) clusters with bacterial homologues and may be a recent acquisition (its best match is pksN1 from Corallococcus coralloides; Supplementary Data 8). b Domain arrangement for significantly upregulated PKS-NRPS hybrid clusters. Multiple partially-assembled A. ricciae CDS are aligned to the more completely assembled, putatively orthologous PKS-NRPS cluster in A. vaga (blue dashed box). The condensation domain used for the phylogeny is highlighted in yellow. c Locations of ca. 40 putative biosynthetic gene clusters (black lines, inner circle) in a haploid, chromosome-scale A. vaga assembly. Blue-shaded sectors show subtelomeric regions; orange track shows density of HGTC. Arrows demark clusters corresponding to AVAG|g23567 (black) and AVAG|g48151 (blue). d Density of a telomeric repeat motif in 25 kb up- and downstream flanking regions surrounding core eukaryotic (BUSCO) genes and putative NRP/PKS (n = 1120, 1138, 97 and 45 for A. vaga and A. ricciae respectively). Boxplots show median and interquartile range (IQR); whiskers extend to the farthest datapoint from the median that remains within 1.5*IQR of Q1 and Q3 respectively. e Expression dynamics for all putative NRP/PKS CDS in A. vaga (n = 60) and A. ricciae (n = 36) at T7 and T24. Boxplot components are as in d, but show distributions exclusively for upregulated NRP/PKS CDS (significant or not); filled symbols indicate significant DE (absolute fold-change > 4, FDR < 1e–3). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
