%0 Journal Article
%A Escudero García-Calderón, José Antonio
%A Mazel, Didier
%T Genomic Plasticity of Vibrio cholerae.
%D 2017
%@ 1139-6709
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/19290
%X Vibrio cholerae is one of the deadliest pathogens in the history of humankind. It is the causative agent of cholera, a disease characterized by a profuse and watery diarrhoea that still today causes 95.000 deaths worldwide every year. V. cholerae is a free living marine organism that interacts with and infects a variety of organisms, from amoeba to humans, including insects and crustaceans. The complexity of the lifestyle and ecology of V. cholerae suggests a high genetic and phenotypic plasticity. In this review, we will focus on two peculiar genomic features that enhance genetic plasticity in this bacterium: the division of its genome in two different chromosomes and the presence of the superintegron, a gene capture device that acts as a large, low-cost memory of adaptive functions, allowing V. cholerae to adapt rapidly.
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