Search the repository

A+ | A- | | SLO | ENG

Abstract: Background: Environmental monitoring of bacterial pathogens is critical for disease control in coastal marine ecosystems to maintain animal welfare and ecosystem function and to prevent significant economic losses. This requires accurate taxonomic identification of environmental bacterial pathogens, which often cannot be achieved by commonly used genetic markers (e.g., 16S rRNA gene), and an understanding of their pathogenic potential based on the information encoded in their genomes. The decreasing costs of whole genome sequencing (WGS), combined with newly developed bioinformatics tools, now make it possible to unravel the full potential of environmental pathogens, beyond traditional microbiological approaches. However, obtaining a high-quality bacterial genome, requires initial cultivation in an axenic culture, which is a bottleneck in environmental microbiology due to cross-contamination in the laboratory or isolation of non-axenic strains. Results: We applied WGS to determine the pathogenic potential of two Vibrio isolates from coastal seawater. During the analysis, we identified cross-contamination of one of the isolates and decided to use this dataset to evaluate the possibility of bioinformatic contaminant removal and recovery of bacterial genomes from a contaminated culture. Despite the contamination, using an appropriate bioinformatics workflow, we were able to obtain high quality and highly identical genomes (Average Nucleotide Identity value 99.98%) of one of the Vibrio isolates from both the axenic and the contaminated culture. Using the assembled genome, we were able to determine that this isolate belongs to a sub-lineage of Vibrio campbellii associated with several diseases in marine organisms. We also found that the genome of the isolate contains a novel Vibrio plasmid associated with bacterial defense mechanisms and horizontal gene transfer, which may offer a competitive advantage to this putative pathogen. Conclusions: Our study shows that, using state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools and a sufficient sequencing effort, it is possible to obtain high quality genomes of the bacteria of interest and perform in-depth genomic analyses even in the case of a contaminated culture. With the new isolate and its complete genome, we are providing new insights into the genomic characteristics and functional potential of this sub-lineage of V. campbellii. The approach described here also highlights the possibility of recovering complete bacterial genomes in the case of non-axenic cultures or obligatory co-cultures.
Keywords: whole-genome assembly, non-axenic culture, plasmid, marine bacteria, marine biology
Published in DiRROS: 28.03.2024; Views: 101; Downloads: 36
Link to file
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cul-tural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstrac-tions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.
Keywords: religion, literature, culture, Islam, philosophy of religion
Published in DiRROS: 28.03.2022; Views: 511; Downloads: 274
Full text (247,81 KB)
This document has many files! More...