Rhodopseudomonas palustris Tn-seq Library

Rhodopseudomonas palustris is an alpha-proteobacterium that has served as a model organism for studies of photophosphorylation, regulation of nitrogen fixation, production of hydrogen as a biofuel and anaerobic degradation of aromatic compounds. This bacterium is able to transition between anaerobic photoautrotrophic growth, anaerobic photoheterotrophic growth and aerobic heterotrophic growth. As a starting point to explore the genetic basis for the metabolic versatility of R. palustris, we used transposon mutagenesis to create a Tn-seq library of approximately 175,000 individual Tn mutants in R. palustris strain CGA009. The library was built using cells growing aerobically in a rich medium. Two technical replicates of this library were sequenced and the FASTQ files can be found here. We mapped the reads to the CGA009 genome and used this information to identify 552 genes as essential for viability. The Tn library generated in this study will be useful for future studies to identify R. palustris genes essential for viability under specialized growth conditions and also for growth under conditions of stress.