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Appl. Environ. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/AEM.01412-07
Copyright (c) 2007, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

Conservation of the chitin utilization pathway in the Vibrionaceae

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge MA 02139, USA ; Laboratory of Microbiology, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mpolz{at}mit.edu.

	Abstract

The Vibrionaceae are regarded as important marine chitin degraders, and attachment to chitin regulates important biological functions; yet the degree of chitin pathway conservation in the Vibrionaceae is unknown. Here, a core chitin degradation pathway is proposed based on comparison of 19 Vibrio and Photobacterium genomes with a detailed metabolic map assembled for V. cholerae from published biochemical, genomic and transcriptomic results. Further, to assess whether chitin degradation is a conserved property of the Vibrionaceae, a set 54 strains from 32 taxa were tested for their ability to grow on various forms of chitin. All strains grew on N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc), the monomer of chitin. The majority of isolates grew on (crab shell) and (squid pen) chitin, and contained chitinase A (chiA) genes. ChiA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis suggests that this gene is a good indicator of chitin metabolism but appears subject to horizontal gene transfer and duplication. Overall, chitin metabolism appears to be a core function of the Vibrionaceae, but individual pathway components exhibit dynamic evolutionary histories.

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