Ralstonia is a bacterial genus that BERIL projects cite as a plant-pathogen example. It appears in three contexts: a conservation–fitness gradient, a co-fitness analysis that had to exclude it, and a global pH-linked co-occurrence cluster 1,2,3. Strain-level designations in the corpus include UW163 and GMI1000 2.
Conservation–fitness gradient
The conservation–fitness gradient spans 194,216 protein-coding genes across 43 diverse bacteria. Ralstonia is the named plant-pathogen example, alongside archaea (Methanococcus) and gut commensals (Bacteroides); see bacteroides 1.
Exclusion from co-fitness / co-inheritance analysis
Ralstonia UW163 and GMI1000 have zero co-fitness data in the Fitness Browser (kescience-fitnessbrowser), even though both are in the organism table. This null result excluded them from the primary co-fitness–co-inheritance analysis 2.
The report flags this exclusion as a limitation. The two Ralstonia organisms are the most phylogenetically diverse and lowest-ANI (average nucleotide identity) cases, so the analysis lacks the species the report judges likely to be most informative 2.
As a proposed remedy, the report suggests computing co-fitness directly as pairwise Pearson correlations from raw genefitness data for Ralstonia and other organisms lacking pre-computed co-fitness. This would recover the missing comparisons. The analysis has not been reported as done 2.
Global pH-driven niche partition
A global analysis of 464K samples associates a Rhodanobacter–Ralstonia–Dyella cluster with environments 1.35 pH units more acidic and 6.9°C warmer than a Brevundimonas–Caulobacter–Sphingomonas cluster worldwide. The report offers this niche partition as the explanation for local co-occurrence at Oak Ridge (oak-ridge-field-research-center, rhodanobacter, sphingomonas). It is a cluster-level environmental association, not a Ralstonia-specific measurement 3.