Effects of synthetic large-scale genome reduction on metabolism and metabolic preferences in a nutritionally complex environment

The soil bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti forms nodules on the roots of leguminous plants, where N2 is reduced to ammonia. Its genome includes a 3.65 Mb chromosome, a 1.35 Mb pSymA megaplasmid, and a 1.68 Mb pSymB chromid. pSymA and pSymB constitute ~45 % of the genome and here a non-targeted approach was used to identify the metabolic consequences of the removal of these replicons. Polar and non-polar metabolites from wild-type, ∆pSymA, …