How do RNA and protein abundances relate to microbial activity?
Very little in evolution makes sense except in light of ecology. (T. Dobzhansky, 1973)
THANKFULLY not every microbe is E. coli. This means however, that we cannot apply the same principle we have learned in E. coli to every environmental microbe. From just a basic look that the biological molecules that make us cells, there is a huge variation, for example in the number of ribosomes different organisms have. This means that not every organism invests as much energy in regulation of transcription and translation, or even just that the concentration or RNA can have a huge difference in terms of protein abundance across these organisms. If you are a slow growing organism, how do you control what genes you turn on and when, and does the magnitude of the change matter as much? These questions are important when we think about the context of transcriptome studies and interpreting what relative amounts of different RNAs mean in environmental systems. In conjunction with our biomarker RNA work done for my PhD, I looked at delving into some of these questions by comparing biomarker abundance in the two anaerobes I studied what this might mean for the relationship between proteins and RNAs.
Astrobiology, Bioremediation, Electromicrobiology, Environmental Microbiology, Geomicrobiology, and Microbial Ecology.