Role of intraspecies recombination in the spread of pathogenicity islands within the Escherichia coli species.

ABSTRACT: Horizontal gene transfer is a key step in the evolution of bacterial pathogens. Besides phages and plasmids, pathogenicity islands (PAIs) are subjected to horizontal transfer. The transfer mechanisms of PAIs within a certain bacterial species or between different species are still not well understood. This study is focused on the High-Pathogenicity Island (HPI), which is a PAI widely spread among extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli and serves as a model for horizontal transfer of PAIs in general. We applied a phylogenetic approach using multilocus sequence typing on HPI-positive and -negative natural E. coli isolates representative of the species diversity to infer the mechanism of horizontal HPI transfer within the E. coli species. In each strain, the partial nucleotide sequences

SUBMITTER: Schubert S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2606025 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature