Meeting Abstract
Larvae of the serpulid polychaete Hydroides elegans, are induced to metamorphose by bacterially-produced biomolecules. Extensive work demonstrated that phage-tail bacteriocins produced by Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea (strain HI1) serve as a metamorphic cue for H. elegans and are composed of multiple proteins. However, little is known how widely these bacteriocins are expressed by other bacteria. We aligned and compared the genomes of fourteen strains of P. luteoviolacea and found homologs of six genes that are required to induce metamorphosis of H. elegans in all of the strains. Further, these genes (macS, macT1, macT2, macB, ORF2, and ORF3) are present in genomes of six additional Pseudoalteromonas species. However, not all inductive bacterial species have bacteriocins in their genomes, nor do all strains that have bacteriocin genes induce larvae of H. elegans to metamorphose. These data suggest that the bacterial intractions that cause larvae of H. elegans to settle and metamorphose are not the same across species in the same bacterial genus, nor across strains within the same bacterial species. Additionally, these data support other experimental data from our research that strongly implicate products other than MACs in very divergent bacterial groups where neither the MAC-producing genes nor structures resembling MACs are found.
