Yang Guo, Zongan Wang, Denghui Li, Lele Wang, Hongxia Lan, Fei Guo, Ziyu Zhao, Zhenjun Liu, Liang Meng, Xuechun Shen, Minxiao Wang, Weishu Zhao, Wei Zhang, Chaodi Kong, Liuxin Shi, Ying Sun, Inge Seim, Aijun Jiang, Kailong Ma, Zidong Su, Nannan Zhang, Qianyue Ji, Junyi Chen, Ke Chen, Chen Qi, Li B, Beibei He, Yuqian Liu, Jiayong Zhou, Yue Zheng, Hailong Zhang, Yue Wang, Mo Han, Tao Yang, Jiawei Tong, Yulu Zhang, Z P Wang, Xiaokai Xu, Jiayu Chen, Yue Liu, Haixin Chen, Tao Zeng, Xiaofeng Wei, Chaolun Li, Huanming Yang, Bo Wang, Xin Liu, Changwei Shao, Wei Zhang, Ying Gu, X Y Xiao, Xun Xu, Yi-Xiang Wang, T. Mock, Guangyi Fan, Yuxiang Li, Shanshan Liu, Yan Dong
Thus, our work positions the deep sea as an evolutionary engine that generates and hosts genetic diversity and bridges genetic knowledge with biotechnology.
The deep sea, as the largest and maybe most hostile environment on Earth, is still underexplored, especially regarding its genetic repertoire. Yet, previous work has revealed significant habitat-specific deep-sea biodiversity. Here, we present an integrated deep-sea microbial genetic dataset comprising 502 million nonredundant genes from 2,138 samples and 2.4 million predicted structures and use it to link specific protein structures with genetic variants associated with life in the deep sea and to assess their biotechnology potential. Combining global sequence analysis with biophysical and biochemical measurements revealed unprecedented sequence diversity and substantial structural conservation of proteins. Especially, proteins involved in replication, recombination, and repair were identified as being under rapid evolution and with specialized properties. Among these, a structurally divergent helicase exhibited advantages in controlling nanopore sequencing speed. Thus, our work positions the deep sea as an evolutionary engine that generates and hosts genetic diversity and bridges genetic knowledge with biotechnology.