A consensus protocol for the recovery of mercury methylation genes from metagenomes

• DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.13687
• Publication Date: 2022-07-15T17:32:33Z
• Authors: Eric Capo; Benjamin D. Peterson; Minjae Kim; Daniel S. Jones; Silvia G. Acinas; Marc Amyot; Stefan Bertilsson; Erik Björn; Moritz Buck; Claudia Cosio; Dwayne A. Elias; Cynthia Gilmour; Marisol Goñi‐Urriza; Baohua Gu; Heyu Lin; Yu‐Rong Liu; Katherine McMahon; John W. Moreau; Jarone Pinhassi; Mircea Podar; Fernando Puente‐S...; Pablo Sánchez; Veronika Storck; Yuya Tada; Adrien Vigneron; David A. Walsh; Marine Vandewalle...; Andrea G. Bravo; Caitlin M. Gionfr...
• Keywords: Methylmercury; Mercury; Environmental DNA

Mercury (Hg) methylation genes (hgcAB) mediate the formation of toxic methylmercury and have been identified from diverse environments, including freshwater marine ecosystems, Arctic permafrost, forest paddy soils, coal-ash amended sediments, chlor-alkali plants discharges geothermal springs. Here we present first attempt at a standardized protocol for detection, identification quantification hgc metagenomes. Our Hg-cycling microorganisms in aquatic terrestrial ecosystems (Hg-MATE) database, catalogue genes, provides most accurate information to date on taxonomic identity functional/metabolic attributes responsible Hg environment. Furthermore, introduce "marky-coco", ready-to-use bioinformatic pipeline based de novo single-metagenome assembly, easy characterization environmental samples. We compared recovery metagenomes using marky-coco with an approach coassembly multiple data show similar efficiency both approaches environments except those high diversity (i.e., soils) which was preferred. Finally, discuss definition true methods normalize gene counts