Given the huge ecological importance of marine picocyanobacteria (Partensky et al., 1999a,1999b) as well as their relatively small genome sizes, an unprecedented international effort has been initiated involving 3 major genome centers (Joint Genome Institute, J. Craig Venter Institute and Genoscope) which has led to the sequencing of 11 Synechococcus and 12 Prochlorococcus strains.

The European contribution to this effort has been provided by the Genoscope which first sequenced Prochlorococcus marinus SS120, published in 2003 (Dufresne et al., 2003), then sequenced two Synechococcus strains, WH7803 and RCC307. A consortium of European teams led by Dr. F. Partensky and Prof. David J. Scanlan has completely annotated these genomes and participated in the annotation of 5 other Synechococcus genomes, sequenced by the J. Craig Venter Institute in the framework of the "microbial genome sequencing project", supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. All five other Synechococcus strains were sequenced under the supervision of Brian Palenik (Palenik et al., 2003, 2006). This set of strains includes isolates from the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (Table 1). It covers 9 of the 10 clades defined by Fuller et al. (2003) in marine sub-cluster 5.1, and also includes one sub-cluster 5.2 representative, the euryhaline, phycocyanin-rich strain WH5701. These strains represent 1-4 of each of the seven pigment types or subtypes defined in this group by Six et al. (2007). A genome comparison paper is out since June 2008 which describes the degree of similarity as well as some major differences between these genomes (Dufresne et al. 2008).

A web interface, "Cyanorak", has been developed by Dr. A. Dufresne in order to retrieve and annotate the clusters of orthologous proteins common to these 11 Synechococcus genomes as well as the first thee published Prochlorococcus genomes, P. marinus SS120 (Dufresne et al., 2003) and MED4 and Prochlorococcus sp. MIT9313 (Rocap et al., 2003). A read-only version is accessible to public here.

For Prochlorococcus, an equivalent initiative has been led by Sallie W. Chisholm (see Kettler et al. 2007 and the Chisholm Lab web page).

 

 Webmester of this page : F. Partensky
Oceanic Plankton Group