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CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity systems of prokaryotes have been identified in 42% of bacteria and 85% of archaea [1] and are actively used in genetic engineering. However, in nitrogen-fixing nodule bacteria required for agriculture, these systems are very poorly characterized. Therefore, in this study, we evaluated the diversity of CRISPR-Cas systems in the genomes of 39 isolates of alfalfa nodule bacteria Sinorhizobium meliloti recovered from soil samples from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, which belong to the Centra...

Nodule bacteria increase the resistance of host plants to abiotic stress factors; however, the role of the genetic potential of rhizobia in the formation of productive salt-tolerant plant-microbial symbiosis remains underestimated. The aim of the study was to evaluate the pool of genes responsible for the salt tolerance of the alfalfa microsymbiont, Sinorhizobium meliloti, using the DNA microarray technique, phenotype microarray (PM), NGS and NNGS-technologies and genome mining (antismash 5.0). As a result of the ...

Nodule bacteria (rhizobia) forming nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with legumes have a multicomponent genome represented by chromosome and a number of plasmids of different sizes. Genes related to symbiotic activity of Sinorhizobium meliloti are located predominantly on two megaplasmids SMa and SMb (1.35 and 1.68 Mb, correspondingly). Genomes at about 80% of native rhizobia nodulating alfalfa contained cryptic plasmids with sizes varied from 7 up to 450 kb. Functional role of this class of plasmids remained unclear up t...