Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
mBio. 2011 Feb 8;2(1):e00334-10. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00334-10. Print 2011.
Lytic bacteriophages are hypothesized to contribute to the seasonality and duration of cholera epidemics in Bangladesh. However, the bacteriophages contributing to this phenomenon have yet to be characterized at a molecular genetic level. In this study, we isolated and sequenced the genomes of 15 bacteriophages from stool samples from cholera patients spanning a 10-year surveillance period in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Our results indicate that a single novel bacteriophage type, designated ICP1 (for the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh cholera phage 1) is present in all stool samples from cholera patients, while two other bacteriophage types, one novel (ICP2) and one T7-like (ICP3), are transient. ICP1 is a member of the Myoviridae family and has a 126-kilobase genome comprising 230 open reading frames. Comparative sequence analysis of ICP1 and related isolates from this time period indicates a high level of genetic conservation. The ubiquitous presence of ICP1 in cholera patients and the finding that the O1 antigen of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) serves as the ICP1 receptor suggest that ICP1 is extremely well adapted to predation of human-pathogenic V. cholerae O1.
裂解噬菌体被认为有助于孟加拉国霍乱流行的季节性和持续时间。然而，在分子遗传水平上尚未对促成这一现象的噬菌体进行特征描述。在这项研究中，我们从孟加拉国达卡的霍乱患者的粪便样本中分离并测序了 15 种噬菌体的基因组，这些样本跨越了 10 年的监测期。我们的研究结果表明，一种新型噬菌体 ICP1（代表国际腹泻病研究中心，孟加拉国霍乱噬菌体 1）存在于所有霍乱患者的粪便样本中，而另外两种噬菌体 ICP2 和 ICP3 是短暂存在的。ICP1 是肌尾噬菌体科的成员，其基因组为 126 千碱基，包含 230 个开放阅读框。对 ICP1 及其同期相关分离株的比较序列分析表明，其具有高度的遗传保守性。在霍乱患者中普遍存在 ICP1，以及 LPS 的 O1 抗原（LPS）作为 ICP1 受体的发现表明，ICP1 非常适应捕食人类致病性霍乱弧菌 O1。
