1887

Abstract

The Gram-positive enteropathogen () is the major cause of healthcare-associated diarrhoea and is also an important cause of community-acquired infectious diarrhoea. Considering the burden of the disease, many studies have employed whole-genome sequencing of bacterial isolates to identify factors that contribute to virulence and pathogenesis. Though extrachromosomal elements (ECEs) such as plasmids are important for these processes in other bacteria, the few characterized plasmids of have no relevant functions assigned and no systematic identification of plasmids has been carried out to date. Here, we perform an analysis of publicly available sequence data to show that ~13 % of all strains contain ECEs, with 1–6 elements per strain. Our approach identifies known plasmids (e.g. pCD6, pCD630 and cloning plasmids) and six novel putative plasmid families. Our study shows that plasmids are abundant and may encode functions that are relevant for physiology. The newly identified plasmids may also form the basis for the construction of novel cloning plasmids for that are compatible with existing tools.

  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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2019-09-01
2024-03-29
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