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Journal of Bacteriology, September 2009, p. 5824-5831, Vol. 191, No. 18
0021-9193/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JB.00519-09
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Genomic Insights into the Convergence and Pathogenicity Factors of Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli Species{triangledown} ,{dagger}

Alejandro Caro-Quintero, Gina P. Rodriguez-Castaño, and Konstantinos T. Konstantinidis*

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Received 16 April 2009/ Accepted 8 July 2009

Whether or not bacteria form coherent evolutionary groups via means of genetic exchange and, hence, elicit distinct species boundaries remains an unsettled issue. A recent report implied that not only may the former be true but also, in fact, the clearly distinct Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli species may be converging as a consequence of increased interspecies gene flow fostered, presumably, by the recent invasion of an overlapping ecological niche (S. K. Sheppard, N. D. McCarthy, D. Falush, and M. C. Maiden, Science 320:237-239, 2008). We have reanalyzed the Campylobacter multilocus sequence typing database used in the previous study and found that the number of interspecies gene transfer events may actually be too infrequent to account, unequivocally, for species convergence. For instance, only 1 to 2% of the 4,507 Campylobacter isolates examined appeared to have imported gene alleles from another Campylobacter species. Furthermore, by analyzing the available Campylobacter genomic sequences, we show that although there seems to be a slightly higher number of exchanged genes between C. jejuni and C. coli relative to other comparable species (~10% versus 2 to 3% of the total genes in the genome, respectively), the function and spatial distribution in the genome of the exchanged genes are far from random, and hence, inconsistent with the species convergence hypothesis. In fact, the exchanged genes appear to be limited to a few environmentally selected cellular functions. Accordingly, these genes may represent important pathogenic determinants of pathogenic Campylobacter, and convergence of (any) two bacterial species remains to be seen.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: 311 Ferst Drive, ES&T, Room 3224, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0512. Phone: (404) 385-3628. Fax: (404) 894-8266. E-mail: kostas{at}ce.gatech.edu

{triangledown} Published ahead of print on 17 July 2009.

{dagger} Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jb.asm.org/.

Journal of Bacteriology, September 2009, p. 5824-5831, Vol. 191, No. 18
0021-9193/09/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JB.00519-09
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.





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