The key genes required for Bacillus anthracis to cause anthrax have been acquired recently
by horizontal gene transfer. To understand the genetic background for the evolution of B. …

In May of 2011, an enteroaggregative Escherichia coli O104:H4 strain that had acquired a
Shiga toxin 2-converting phage caused a large outbreak of bloody diarrhea in Europe which …

Virulence of Vibrio cholerae depends on secretion of cholera toxin (CT), which is encoded
within the genome of a filamentous phage, CTXφ. Release of CT is mediated by the …

The novel epidemic strain Vibrio cholerae O139 Bengal originated from a seventh-pandemic
O1 El Tor strain by antigenic shift resulting from homologous recombination-mediated …

Background New DNA sequencing technologies have enabled detailed comparative genomic
analyses of entire genera of bacterial pathogens. Prior to this study, three species of the …

Clostridium difficile causes one of the leading nosocomial infections in developed countries,
and therapeutic choices are limited. Some strains of C. difficile produce phage tail-like …

Background The real-time generation of information about pathogen genomes has become
a vital goal for transmission analysis and characterisation in rapid outbreak responses. In …

Twenty-two Vibrio cholerae isolates, including some from “epidemic” (O1 and O139) and “nonepidemic”
serogroups, were characterized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and …

The conventional and most accepted method of measuring the lytic activity of a phage
against its bacterial host is the plaque assay. This method is laborious, time consuming and …

Thanks to high-throughput sequencing technologies, genome sequencing has become a
common component in nearly all aspects of viral research; thus, we are experiencing an …