Structural color in the bacterial domain: the ecogenomics of a 2-dimensional optical phenotype

Using this information, we constructed a classifier to predict structural colour directly from bacterial genome sequences, validated it by scoring 100 strains that were not involved in creating the structural colour classifier, and predicted that photonic structures are widely distributed within Gram-negative bacteria. Analysis of over 13 thousand assembled metagenomes predicted that SC is nearly absent from most habitats associated with multicellular organisms except macroalgae and is abundant in marine waters and surface/air interfaces.

This work provides the first large-scale ecogenomics view of structural colour in bacteria and identifies microbial pathways and evolutionary relationships that underlie this optical phenomenon.