Alm R A, Ling L S, Moir D T, King B L, Brown E D, Doig P C, Smith D R, Noonan B, Guild B C, deJonge B L, Carmel G, Tummino P J, Caruso A, Uria-Nickelsen M, Mills D M, Ives C, Gibson R, Merberg D, Mills S D, Jiang Q, Taylor D E, Vovis G F, Trust T J
Astra Research Center Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4239, USA.
Nature. 1999 Jan 14;397(6715):176-80. doi: 10.1038/16495.
Helicobacter pylori, one of the most common bacterial pathogens of humans, colonizes the gastric mucosa, where it appears to persist throughout the host's life unless the patient is treated. Colonization induces chronic gastric inflammation which can progress to a variety of diseases, ranging in severity from superficial gastritis and peptic ulcer to gastric cancer and mucosal-associated lymphoma. Strain-specific genetic diversity has been proposed to be involved in the organism's ability to cause different diseases or even be beneficial to the infected host and to participate in the lifelong chronicity of infection. Here we compare the complete genomic sequences of two unrelated H. pylori isolates. This is, to our knowledge, the first such genomic comparison. H. pylori was believed to exhibit a large degree of genomic and allelic diversity, but we find that the overall genomic organization, gene order and predicted proteomes (sets of proteins encoded by the genomes) of the two strains are quite similar. Between 6 to 7% of the genes are specific to each strain, with almost half of these genes being clustered in a single hypervariable region.
幽门螺杆菌是人类最常见的细菌病原体之一，它定植于胃黏膜，在那里，除非患者接受治疗，否则它似乎会在宿主的一生中持续存在。定植会引发慢性胃炎症，这种炎症可发展为多种疾病，严重程度从浅表性胃炎和消化性溃疡到胃癌和黏膜相关淋巴瘤不等。菌株特异性基因多样性被认为与该生物体引发不同疾病的能力有关，甚至可能对受感染宿主有益，并参与感染的终身慢性化过程。在此，我们比较了两株不相关的幽门螺杆菌分离株的完整基因组序列。据我们所知，这是首次进行此类基因组比较。幽门螺杆菌被认为具有很大程度的基因组和等位基因多样性，但我们发现这两株菌株的整体基因组组织、基因顺序和预测的蛋白质组（基因组编码的蛋白质组）非常相似。每株菌株有6%至7%的基因是特异性的，其中几乎一半的基因聚集在一个单一的高变区。
