Blokesch Melanie, Seed Kimberley D
Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, Global Health Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2025 Sep 4;380(1934):20240076. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0076.
Cholera remains a significant global health burden. The causative agent responsible for the ongoing cholera pandemic, which began in 1961, is the seventh pandemic El Tor (7PET) lineage of . Over the past century, lineages of have been traced using phage typing schemes, DNA hybridization on microarrays and, more recently, comparative genomics enabled by next-generation sequencing. Such lineage tracing has provided essential insights into cholera transmission dynamics. Beyond their use as tools in typing schemes, phages have long been recognized as major players in cholera epidemiology. Importantly, the integration of comparative genomics, epidemiology and molecular studies has recently provided compelling evidence that bacterial defence systems, along with the evolutionary adaptations of phages to counteract them, play critical roles in the ongoing arms race between pandemic and their phages, with phage resistance likely influencing cholera epidemiology. In this review, we explore abundant and sporadic defence systems in sub-lineages of 7PET and describe how they protect their bacterial hosts from predatory phages. Additionally, we contrast these findings with the defence activities observed in the sixth pandemic classical lineage of . Finally, we discuss the experimental challenges and limitations associated with studying defence systems in and propose future directions to advance research in this field.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'The ecology and evolution of bacterial immune systems'.
霍乱仍然是一项重大的全球卫生负担。引发始于1961年的当前霍乱大流行的病原体是第七次大流行埃尔托（7PET）谱系的霍乱弧菌。在过去的一个世纪里，霍乱弧菌的谱系通过噬菌体分型方案、微阵列上的DNA杂交以及最近通过下一代测序实现的比较基因组学来追踪。这种谱系追踪为霍乱传播动态提供了重要见解。除了用作分型方案的工具外，噬菌体长期以来一直被认为是霍乱流行病学中的主要参与者。重要的是，比较基因组学、流行病学和分子研究的整合最近提供了令人信服的证据，表明细菌防御系统以及噬菌体为对抗这些系统而进行的进化适应，在当前大流行霍乱弧菌与其噬菌体之间的军备竞赛中发挥着关键作用，噬菌体抗性可能影响霍乱流行病学。在这篇综述中，我们探索了7PET霍乱弧菌亚谱系中的丰富和零星防御系统，并描述了它们如何保护其细菌宿主免受捕食性噬菌体的侵害。此外，我们将这些发现与在第六次大流行霍乱弧菌经典谱系中观察到的防御活动进行了对比。最后，我们讨论了研究霍乱弧菌防御系统相关的实验挑战和局限性，并提出了推进该领域研究的未来方向。本文是“细菌免疫系统的生态与进化”讨论会议题的一部分。
