Rivera-Vicéns, Ramón E.

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    Deciphering the Debaryomyces spp. complex using next generation sequencing: Are they the same species?
    (2018-05) Rivera-Vicéns, Ramón E.; Nadathur, Govind S.; College of Arts and Sciences - Sciences; Schizas, Nikolaos; Saliceti, Lorenzo; Otero Morales, Ernesto; Department of Marine Sciences; Ramirez, Lillian
    Debaryomyces hansenii is a unicellular marine yeast, from the Phylum Ascomycota and is widely distributed in nature. It has been isolated from high salt environments like estuaries and bays, to salty foods and cheese. This yeast has a rounded morphology, is non-mobile and can withstand up to 12% of NaCl (w/v) and pH levels between 3.0-10.0 (optimal pH=7). Some strains can even withstand up to 25% of NaCl (w/v), making these strains extreme halophiles. The current classification of this yeast differentiates Debaryomyces spp. into two independent taxonomic entities, D. hansenii and D. fabryi. Although many studies have been performed for the taxonomic assignment of the Debaryomyces genera (i.e. single gene sequencing, molecular characterization), most of the results in these studies have been ambiguous and still there is not a clear pattern on how to classify these organisms at the species and strain level. In this study, we employed Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and used different bioinformatics tools for the creation of six genomes of the Debaryoymyces spp. These new genomes coupled with other current available genomes were used for the generation of phylogenies to aim to resolved the taxonomic assignment problem in this group of closely related species. We have showed that the use of NGS and bioinformatics can be used to taxonomically assign yeast species at the strain level. We also present data that shows how the flavinogenic capability, that some of these strains posses, could be a result of a speciation event in which divided species that are flavinogenic versus non-flavinogenic. This result was observed in our different phylogeny analysis (i.e. Bayesian and Maximum Likelihood) throughout the study.