Kittredge, H. 2021. Consequences of horizontal gene transfer in soil bacteria. Dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI.

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a driving force in bacterial evolution and could drive rapid adaptation in bacterial communities. Natural transformation is one mechanism of HGT that allows bacteria to pick up extracellular DNA (eDNA) from the environment and integrate it into their genome. But the rate of HGT in natural environments, and the role this process plays in facilitating rapid adaptation remains unknown. As climate change threatens the stability of environments worldwide, understanding how quickly bacteria can adapt to novel environments is essential. My dissertation research characterizes the environmental drivers and evolutionary consequences of natural transformation in a highly transformable model soil bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri.

Despite decades of research on understanding HGT at the molecular level, less is known about the ecological drivers of HGT. To understand the soil conditions relevant for transformation, I first measured eDNA in the field over a short-term drying rewetting disturbance (Ch. 2). I found that eDNA increased in response to the rewetting disturbance but quickly disappeared from soil, suggesting a small portion of this eDNA could be transformed by bacterial cells recovering from the disturbance. To test the efficiency of transformation under the conditions in which eDNA disappeared, I created a novel microcosm system for quantifying transformation in soil (Ch. 3). Here, I inoculated soil with live antibiotic-susceptible, and dead antibiotic-resistant P. stutzeri. I then tracked the evolution of antibiotic resistance over a range of soil conditions and eDNA concentrations. Transformation drove the evolution of antibiotic resistance across a wide range of soil moistures and increased in response to larger inputs of dead cells (eDNA source), with antibiotic resistance repeatedly appearing in antibiotic free soil.

Despite the prevalence of transformation across bacterial species, the evolutionary origins and consequences of transformation are still largely unknown. Transformation presumably provides a fitness benefit in stressful or continuously changing environments, but few studies have quantified changes in transformation in response to adaptive evolution. Here, I evolved P. stutzeri at different salinities and tested how the growth rate and transformation efficiency changed in response to salt adaptation (Ch. 4). Overall, the growth rate increased in response to adaptation, but the transformation efficiency declined, with only ~50% of the evolved populations transforming eDNA at the end of experiment – as opposed to 100% of ancestral populations transforming eDNA.

Overall, my dissertation research elucidates the factors driving transformation in soil, setting the stage for future experiments to scale up estimates of transformation to the whole community level. I find that transformation occurs under most soil conditions and allows genetic variants to arise at low frequencies in the absence of selection. I also report novel experimental evidence that transformation efficiency can change dramatically, and in a highly variable manner, over just ~330 generations. Taken together, this body of research highlights a role for transformation in many natural systems of ecological significance, and points to dead cells as an important but often overlooked source of genetic diversity.

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