Pathogen Genomics, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, UK.
Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, CB2 0QQ, UK.
Future Microbiol. 2012 Nov;7(11):1283-1296. doi: 10.2217/fmb.12.108.
Evolution of bacterial pathogen populations has been detected in a variety of ways including phenotypic tests, such as metabolic activity, reaction to antisera and drug resistance and genotypic tests that measure variation in chromosome structure, repetitive loci and individual gene sequences. While informative, these methods only capture a small subset of the total variation and, therefore, have limited resolution. Advances in sequencing technologies have made it feasible to capture whole-genome sequence variation for each sample under study, providing the potential to detect all changes at all positions in the genome from single nucleotide changes to large-scale insertions and deletions. In this review, we focus on recent work that has applied this powerful new approach and summarize some of the advances that this has brought in our understanding of the details of how bacterial pathogens evolve.
细菌病原体种群的进化已经通过多种方式被检测到，包括表型测试，如代谢活性、对抗血清和药物抗性的反应，以及测量染色体结构、重复基因座和单个基因序列变异的基因型测试。虽然这些方法提供了有用的信息，但它们只能捕捉到总变异的一小部分，因此分辨率有限。测序技术的进步使得捕获每个研究样本的全基因组序列变异成为可能，从而有可能从单个核苷酸变化到大规模插入和缺失，检测基因组中所有位置的所有变化。在这篇综述中，我们重点介绍了最近应用这种强大新方法的工作，并总结了这一方法在我们理解细菌病原体进化细节方面带来的一些进展。
