Publications by authors named "Lee H Bergstrand"
Summary: A critical step in comparative genomics is the identification of differences in the presence/absence of encoded biochemical pathways among organisms. Our library, Pygenprop, facilitates these comparisons using data from the Genome Properties database. Pygenprop is written in Python and, unlike existing libraries, it is compatible with a variety of tools in the Python data science ecosystem, such as Jupyter Notebooks for interactive analyses and scikit-learn for machine learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSteroids are abundant growth substrates for bacteria in natural, engineered, and host-associated environments. This study analyzed the distribution of the aerobic 9,10-seco steroid degradation pathway in 346 publically available metagenomes from diverse environments. Our results show that steroid-degrading bacteria are globally distributed and prevalent in particular environments, such as wastewater treatment plants, soil, plant rhizospheres, and the marine environment, including marine sponges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Steroids are widely present in nature and serve as key growth substrates for a variety of microorganisms, which are significant for both ecological and biotechnical contexts.
- Researchers identified 265 potential steroid-degrading bacteria, mostly from Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, examining their genomes and revealing new genera capable of steroid degradation.
- The study suggests an ancestral pathway for steroid degradation evolved through gene duplications and horizontal gene transfer, indicating that steroid catabolism is essential for the ecological roles of many Actinobacteria and specific Proteobacteria.