A large scale comparative genomic analysis reveals insertion sites for newly acquired genomic islands in bacterial genomes

BMC Microbiology

Chen Chen³  George F Gao⁴  Di Liu¹  Haiying Wang³  Yinxue Yang²  Pengcheng Du³ 

[1] Network Information Center, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Affiliated Hospital of Ningxia Medical University, Ningxia 750001, China;National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Center for Disease Control and Prevention/State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, Beijing 102206, China;Beijing Institutes of Life Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

关键词: evolution;    genomic island;    switch sites of GC-skew;   

Others  :  1223670
DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-11-135

 received in 2010-08-18, accepted in 2011-06-15,  发布年份 2011

【 摘 要 】

Background

Bacterial virulence enhancement and drug resistance are major threats to public health worldwide. Interestingly, newly acquired genomic islands (GIs) from horizontal transfer between different bacteria strains were found in Vibrio cholerae, Streptococcus suis, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which caused outbreak of epidemic diseases in recently years.

Results

Using a large-scale comparative genomic analysis of 1088 complete genomes from all available bacteria (1009) and Archaea (79), we found that newly acquired GIs are often anchored around switch sites of GC-skew (sGCS). After calculating correlations between relative genomic distances of genomic islands to sGCSs and the evolutionary distances of the genomic islands themselves, we found that newly acquired genomic islands are closer to sGCSs than the old ones, indicating that regions around sGCSs are hotspots for genomic island insertion.

Conclusions

Based on our results, we believe that genomic regions near sGCSs are hotspots for horizontal transfer of genomic islands, which may significantly affect key properties of epidemic disease-causing pathogens, such as virulence and adaption to new environments.

【 授权许可】

   
2011 Du et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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