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

BMC Microbiology

Research Article

Yinxue Yang¹  George F Gao²  Haiying Wang³  Pengcheng Du³  Chen Chen³  Di Liu⁴ 

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

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

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2180-11-135

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

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBacterial 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.ResultsUsing 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.ConclusionsBased 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】

Unknown   
© Du et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.