Genome hypermobility by lateral transduction

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Abstract

Genetic transduction is a major evolutionary force that underlies bacterial adaptation. Here we report that the temperate bacteriophages of Staphylococcus aureus engage in a distinct form of transduction we term lateral transduction. Staphylococcal prophages do not follow the previously described excision-replication-packaging pathway but instead excise late in their lytic program. Here, DNA packaging initiates in situ from integrated prophages, and large metameric spans including several hundred kilobases of the S. aureus genome are packaged in phage heads at very high frequency. In situ replication before DNA packaging creates multiple prophage genomes so that lateral-transducing particles form during normal phage maturation, transforming parts of the S. aureus chromosome into hypermobile regions of gene transfer.

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ClonalFrameML: Efficient Inference of Recombination in Whole Bacterial Genomes

Xavier Didelot, Daniel J Wilson (2015)

Recombination is an important evolutionary force in bacteria, but it remains challenging to reconstruct the imports that occurred in the ancestry of a genomic sample. Here we present ClonalFrameML, which uses maximum likelihood inference to simultaneously detect recombination in bacterial genomes and account for it in phylogenetic reconstruction. ClonalFrameML can analyse hundreds of genomes in a matter of hours, and we demonstrate its usefulness on simulated and real datasets. We find evidence for recombination hotspots associated with mobile elements in Clostridium difficile ST6 and a previously undescribed 310kb chromosomal replacement in Staphylococcus aureus ST582. ClonalFrameML is freely available at http://clonalframeml.googlecode.com/.

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The toxic shock syndrome exotoxin structural gene is not detectably transmitted by a prophage

Mary O'Reilly, Marsha J. Betley, Sven Löfdahl … (1983)

Toxic shock syndrome (TSS) is a complex of generalized symptoms caused by a local staphylococcal infection, and a circulating toxin is thought to be involved. Indeed, nearly 100% of TSS isolates produce an exoprotein, TSSE, that is thought to have an aetiological role on the basis of positive animal tests (refs 1,2 and F. Quimby, personal communication) and human serological data. Although the precise role of TSSE in TSS remains unclear (E. Kass, personal communication), no other staphylococcal factor has been implicated. Our preliminary studies of the genetics of TSSE production failed to demonstrate plasmid or phage involvement or linkage with known chromosomal genes (ref. 4 and B.N.K. et al., unpublished data); however, Schutzer et al. have found that most TSS strains harbour prophages with common plating characteristics and suggest that the toxin(s) involved in TSS are transmitted by lysogenic conversion. We show here that TSSE is not demonstrably transferred by lysogeny; moreover, we have cloned the gene and found that the cloned product is serologically and biologically indistinguishable from the native protein, and that the TSSE determinant is associated with a larger DNA segment that is absent or rearranged in TSSE- strains.