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Advances in Microbial Genomics and Evolution

A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Microbiology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 3115

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Guest Editor
Department of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Health, Lisbon, Portugal
Interests: microbial genomics; evolutionary biology; microbiology; molecular biology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

During the last decade, we have faced a rampant release of microbial genomic data due to the progressive access of thousands of world-dispersed labs to equipment such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). In addition, the obvious decline of NGS-associated costs has allowed for the molecular epidemiology field to enter a new era by replacing the laborious and less informative traditional typing methods with information based on whole genomes. These methodological advances are always coupled with the extensive development of bioinformatic approaches to analyze genomic data in a more robust and accurate fashion. Due to the availability of billions of microbial genome sequences in public databases, we now have a clearer picture of how microbes evolve, about the mechanism of disease, their arsenal of virulence factors and resistance markers, as well as their tropism and geographic distribution.  

This Special Issue, “Advances in Microbial Genomics and Evolution”, of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences will comprise a selection of research papers and reviews that will contribute to a better understanding of such tiny “creatures” that have a massive impact on our lives.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Microbial evolution;
  • Genetics underlying tissue- and host tropism;
  • Population genetics;
  • Virulence factors and microbial drug resistance;
  • Genomics underlying the mechanism of the disease.

Since IJMS is a journal of molecular science, pure clinical/investigation studies will not be suitable for our journal. However, clinical submissions with biomolecular experiments are welcomed.

Dr. Joao Paulo Gomes
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Molecular Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

  • microbial evolution
  • adaptation
  • virulence
  • tissue tropism
  • population genetics
  • mechanisms of disease
  • intra-host genetic diversity

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

16 pages, 333 KiB  
Article
Staphylococcal Enterotoxin Genes in Coagulase-Negative Staphylococci—Stability, Expression, and Genomic Context
by Sylwia Banaszkiewicz, Ewa Wałecka-Zacharska, Justyna Schubert, Aleksandra Tabiś, Jarosław Król, Tadeusz Stefaniak, Ewelina Węsierska and Jacek Bania
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022, 23(5), 2560; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23052560 - 25 Feb 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2488
Abstract
In the current study, we screened a collection of coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) isolates for orthologues of staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) involved in S. aureus-related staphylococcal food poisoning (SFP). The amplicons corresponding to SEs were detected in S. chromogenes, S. epidermidis, S. [...] Read more.
In the current study, we screened a collection of coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) isolates for orthologues of staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) involved in S. aureus-related staphylococcal food poisoning (SFP). The amplicons corresponding to SEs were detected in S. chromogenes, S. epidermidis, S. haemolyticus, S. borealis, S. pasteuri, S. saprophyticus, S. vitulinus, S. warneri, and S. xylosus. All amplicons were sequenced and identified as parts of known S. aureus or S. epidermidis SE genes. Quantitative real-time PCR allowed determining the relative copy number of each SE amplicon. A significant portion of the amplicons of the sea, seb, sec, and seh genes occurred at low copy numbers. Only the amplicons of the sec gene identified in three isolates of S. epidermidis displayed relative copy numbers comparable to sec in the reference enterotoxigenic S. aureus and S. epidermidis strains. Consecutive passages in microbiological media of selected CoNS isolates carrying low copy numbers of sea, seb, sec, and seh genes resulted in a decrease of gene copy number. S. epidermidis isolates harbored a high copy number of sec, which remained stable over the passages. We demonstrated that enterotoxin genes may occur at highly variable copy numbers in CoNS. However, we could identify enterotoxin genes only in whole-genome sequences of CoNS carrying them in a stable form at high copy numbers. Only those enterotoxins were expressed at the protein level. Our results indicate that PCR-based detection of enterotoxin genes in CoNS should always require an additional control, like analysis of their presence in the bacterial genome. We also demonstrate S. epidermidis as a CoNS species harboring SE genes in a stable form at a specific chromosome site and expressing them as a protein. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Microbial Genomics and Evolution)
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