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Contribution of phage‐derived genomic islands to the virulence of facultative bacterial pathogens
Author(s) -
Busby Ben,
Kristensen David M.,
Koonin Eugene V.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
environmental microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.954
H-Index - 188
eISSN - 1462-2920
pISSN - 1462-2912
DOI - 10.1111/j.1462-2920.2012.02886.x
Subject(s) - biology , prophage , facultative , virulence , genome , microbiology and biotechnology , mobile genetic elements , bacterial genome size , genomic island , bacteriophage , genetics , gene , escherichia coli , ecology
Summary Facultative pathogens have extremely dynamic pan‐genomes, to a large extent derived from bacteriophages and other mobile elements. We developed a simple approach to identify phage‐derived genomic islands and apply it to show that pathogens from diverse bacterial genera are significantly enriched in clustered phage‐derived genes compared with related benign strains. These findings show that genome expansion by integration of prophages containing virulence factors is a major route of evolution of facultative bacterial pathogens.