Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-18-2016

Publication Title

PLOS One

Volume

11

Pages

e0166757

Publisher Name

PLOS

Abstract

Bacterial surveys of the vaginal and bladder human microbiota have revealed an abundance of many similar bacterial taxa. As the bladder was once thought to be sterile, the complex interactions between microbes within the bladder have yet to be characterized. To initiate this process, we have begun sequencing isolates, including the clinically relevant genus Gardnerella. Herein, we present the genomic sequences of four Gardnerella strains isolated from the bladders of women with symptoms of urgency urinary incontinence; these are the first Gardnerella genomes produced from this niche. Congruent to genomic characterization of Gardnerella isolates from the reproductive tract, isolates from the bladder reveal a large pangenome, as well as evidence of high frequency horizontal gene transfer. Prophage gene sequences were found to be abundant amongst the strains isolated from the bladder, as well as amongst publicly available Gardnerella genomes from the vagina and endometrium, motivating an in depth examination of these sequences. Amongst the 39 Gardnerella strains examined here, there were more than 400 annotated prophage gene sequences that we could cluster into 95 homologous groups; 49 of these groups were unique to a single strain. While many of these prophages exhibited no sequence similarity to any lytic phage genome, estimation of the rate of phage acquisition suggests both vertical and horizontal acquisition. Furthermore, bioinformatic evidence indicates that prophage acquisition is ongoing within both vaginal and bladder Gardnerella populations. The abundance of prophage sequences within the strains examined here suggests that phages could play an important role in the species’ evolutionary history and in its interactions within the complex communities found in the female urinary and reproductive tracts.

Identifier

10.1371/journal.pone.0166757

Comments

Author Posting © PLOS, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of PLOS ONE for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in PLOS ONE, Volume 11, November, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166757

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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