Clustured regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) genetic diversity studies as a mean to reconstruct the evolution of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.
The natural history of tuberculosis may be tackled by various means, among which the record of molecular scars that have been registered by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) genomes transmitted from patient to patient for tens of thousands years and possibly more. Recently discovered polymorphic loci, the CRISPR sequences, are indirect witnesses of the historical phage-bacteria struggle, and may be related to the time when the ancestor of today's tubercle bacilli were environmental bacteria, i.e. before becoming intracellular parasites. In this article, we present what are CRISPRs and try to summarize almost 20 years of research results obtained using the genetic diversity of the CRISPR loci in MTBC as a perspective for studying new models. We show that the study of the diversity of CRISPR sequences, thanks to «spoligotyping», has played a great role in our global understanding of the population structure of MTBC.
Institut de Biologie Intégrative de la Cellule (I2BC), CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France. Electronic address: christophe.sola@u-psud.fr.
Christophe
C
Sola
D000465:Algorithms; D015373:Bacterial Typing Techniques; D064112:Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats / Q000235:genetics*; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D014644:Genetic Variation / Q000235:genetics*; D016680:Genome, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D058889:Molecular Typing; D009169:Mycobacterium tuberculosis / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / Q000235:genetics
D004269:DNA, Bacterial
CRISPR; Genomics; Molecular evolution; Spoligotyping; Tuberculosis