Understanding the regulatory response to variable oxygen availability and evolutionary trends of facultatively anaerobic bacteria

Many bacteria and fungi are facultative anaerobes, able to adjust to atmospheric levels of oxygen, the complete absence of oxygen, and everything in between. This flexibility has contributed to their ubiquity in natural environments that vary widely in oxygen availability. Most studies elucidating the molecular and cellular basis of this metabolic response have been performed in the model bacterial strain Escherichia coli K-12, but it is not clear the extent to which this understanding can be applied across other facultative anaerobes. This project aimed to fill a major gap in understanding the extent of and drivers of diversity in the bacterial response to oxygen availability by 1) determining the degree of conservation and variation of regulatory responses 2) understanding redundancy within these responses and 3) understanding if there are trends in the mode of evolution in gene families. Using a multi-omic genome-scale approach, this work provies an unprecedented understanding of the response to varying oxygen levels.