Vibrio cholerae is a human pathogen that thrives in estuarine environments. Within the environment and human host, V. cholerae uses the type VI secretion system (T6SS) to inject toxic effectors into neighboring microbes and to establish its replicative niche. V. cholerae strains encode a wide variety of horizontally shared effectors, but pandemic isolates encode an identical set of distinct effectors. Effector set retention in pandemic strains despite mobility between disparate strains suggests that horizontal acquisition of these effectors was crucial for evolving pandemic V. cholerae. We attempted to locate the donor of the pandemic effectors to V. cholerae. To this end, we identified potential gene transfer events of the pandemic-associated T6SS clusters between a fish pathogen, Vibrio anguillarum, and V. cholerae. We supported the likelihood of interaction between these species by demonstrating that homologous effector-immunity pairs from V. cholerae and V. anguillarum can cross-neutralize one another. Thus, V. anguillarum constitutes an environmental reservoir of pandemic-associated V. cholerae T6SS effectors that may have initially facilitated competition between pre-pandemic V. cholerae and V. anguillarum for an environmental niche.

Read more here

Viewing Message: 1 of 1.
Warning

Blog.nus accounts will move to SSO login, tentatively before the start of AY24/25 Sem 2. Once implemented, only current NUS staff and students will be able to log in to Blog.nus. Public blogs remain readable to non-logged in users. (More information.)