Vibrionaceae genome dynamics

Abstract

Vibrionaceae is a family in the class Gammaproteobacteria that has 11 genera that are mostly found in marine niches. It is an important family from a human health perspective due to Vibrio cholerae causing millions of infections every year. Other members of the family cause millions of dollars in damage to the aquaculture industry due to their pathogenesis of fish. Research on the family doesn't tend to span the entirety of species sequenced and this thesis's work aims to understand characteristics of the species in the context of the whole family dynamics. General sequence characteristics of publicly available Vibrionaceae such as genome GC%, genome length, codon bias, plasmids, virulence and AMR genes are identified across the family in this research. From this a subset of genomes focused around V. cholerae, V. vulnificus and V. parahaemolyticus were selected for more in-depth study of gene content and potential horizontal gene transfer. To expand upon the dynamics of gene flow seen within publicly available data bacterial samples were collected from the English Channel and sequenced to identify potential gene flow in a natural population to species of other bacterial families.