Pseudomonas aeruginosa clinical and environmental isolates constitute a single population with high phenotypic diversity.
BACKGROUND
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen with a high incidence of hospital infections that represents a threat to immune compromised patients. Genomic studies have shown that, in contrast to other pathogenic bacteria, clinical and environmental isolates do not show particular genomic differences. In addition, genetic variability of all the P. aeruginosa strains whose genomes have been sequenced is extremely low. This low genomic variability might be explained if clinical strains constitute a subpopulation of this bacterial species present in environments that are close to human populations, which preferentially produce virulence associated traits.


RESULTS
In this work, we sequenced the genomes and performed phenotypic descriptions for four non-human P. aeruginosa isolates collected from a plant, the ocean, a water-spring, and from dolphin stomach. We show that the four strains are phenotypically diverse and that this is not reflected in genomic variability, since their genomes are almost identical. Furthermore, we performed a detailed comparative genomic analysis of the four strains studied in this work with the thirteen previously reported P. aeruginosa genomes by means of describing their core and pan-genomes.


CONCLUSIONS
Contrary to what has been described for other bacteria we have found that the P. aeruginosa core genome is constituted by a high proportion of genes and that its pan-genome is thus relatively small. Considering the high degree of genomic conservation between isolates of P. aeruginosa from diverse environments, including human tissues, some implications for the treatment of infections are discussed. This work also represents a methodological contribution for the genomic study of P. aeruginosa, since we provide a database of the comparison of all the proteins encoded by the seventeen strains analyzed.
María-Victoria
MV
Grosso-Becerra
Christian
C
Santos-Medellín
Abigail
A
González-Valdez
José-Luis
JL
Méndez
Gabriela
G
Delgado
Rosario
R
Morales-Espinosa
Luis
L
Servín-González
Luis-David
LD
Alcaraz
Departamento de Biología Molecular y Biotecnología, Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 México, DF, México. gloria@biomedicas.unam.mx.
Gloria
G
Soberón-Chávez
D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010641:Phenotype; D011550:Pseudomonas aeruginosa / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D014774:Virulence