Identity
Canonical name: Aluminum. 1
Known alias: Al. 1
Stable external identifier: No stable external identifier was reported in the source document. 1
Aluminum is a metal condition analyzed in the metal-cross-resistance study of gene-level fitness responses across diverse bacteria. 1
Key facts
The study analyzed 452 metal experiments across 37 organisms and 14 metals, including aluminum conditions. 1
Aluminum was the most independent metal in the cross-resistance analysis, with a mean correlation of r = 0.34. 1
The weakest listed aluminum associations were Al-Ni, with r = 0.34, and Al-Co, with r = 0.30. 1
All 15 metal pairs tested in at least 5 organisms showed greater than 90% sign consistency, and no metal pair showed systematically negative cross-resistance in any organism, including aluminum pairings. 1
The report describes cross-resistance as having a universal directional layer and a chemistry-specific magnitude layer; aluminum’s relatively weaker associations suggest the hypothesis that its toxicity mechanisms overlap less strongly with those of some other metals. 1
The newer Pan-Bacterial Metal Fitness Atlas refines this interpretation by separating aluminum’s broadly required cellular responses from specialized resistance: across the atlas, 1,381 aluminum-important genes had a core fraction of 0.898, a core-fraction delta of +0.107, OR=2.37, and p=1.2e-26. 2 The newer Metal-Specific vs General Stress Genes further refines this result: 752 of 1,772 aluminum-important gene records (42.4%) were classified as metal-specific using non-metal sick rates, indicating a substantial specialized subset within an aluminum response that is also strongly core-enriched. 3 This genome-wide core enrichment supports a general metal-stress robustness component, while it does not contradict the weaker aluminum cross-resistance magnitude. 2
Across phylogenetically diverse organisms, aluminum-associated cross-resistance patterns were generally positive, but the report notes that the organisms were not phylogenetically independent and that formal methods such as PGLS (phylogenetic generalized least squares) or independent contrasts would strengthen the conservation analysis. 1
The study did not establish that aluminum cross-resistance predicts isolation from metal-associated environments: the BacDive validation was underpowered, with 20 independent species after matching and collapsing, while the limitations section also reports n = 26 at the Fitness Browser organism scale. 1
Related pages
- metal-cross-resistance — synthesis of aluminum’s relatively independent cross-resistance pattern and the atlas’s core-enrichment result. 1,2
- cofitness-network-architecture — gene-level fitness correlations across metal conditions. 1
- condition-specific-fitness — condition-linked gene importance across metal experiments. 1
- environmental-resistome — environmental validation of metal-associated resistance signatures. 1
- Gene-Resolution Metal Cross-Resistance Across Diverse Bacteria — source-project summary. 1
- Pan-Bacterial Metal Fitness Atlas — cross-species aluminum fitness and pangenome analysis. 2
- Metal-Specific vs General Stress Genes — classification of aluminum-important genes by metal specificity. 3