TY - JOUR T1 - The Systemic Imprint of Growth and Its Uses in Ecological (Meta)Genomics A1 - Vieira-Silva, Sara A1 - Rocha, Eduardo P. C. Y1 - 2010/01/15 N2 - Author Summary Microbial minimal generation times vary from a few minutes to several weeks. The reasons for this disparity have been thought to lie on different life-history strategies: fast-growing microbes grow extremely fast in rich media, but are less capable of dealing with stress and/or poor nutrient conditions. Prokaryotes have evolved a set of genomic traits to grow fast, including biased codon usage and transient or permanent gene multiplication for dosage effects. Here, we studied the relative role of these traits and show they can be used to predict minimal generation times from the genomic data of the vast majority of microbes that cannot be cultivated. We show that this inference can also be made with incomplete genomes and thus be applied to metagenomic data to test hypotheses about the biomass productivity of biotopes and the evolution of microbiota in the human gut after birth. Our results also allow a better understanding of the co-evolution between growth rates and genomic traits and how they can be manipulated in synthetic biology. Growth rates have been a key variable in microbial physiology studies in the last century, and we show how intimately they are linked with genome organization and prokaryotic ecology. JF - PLOS Genetics JA - PLOS Genetics VL - 6 IS - 1 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000808 SP - e1000808 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000808 ER -