Recombination Shapes the Structure of an EnvironmentalVibrio choleraePopulation
ABSTRACTVibrio choleraeconsists of pathogenic strains that cause sporadic gastrointestinal illness or epidemic cholera disease and nonpathogenic strains that grow and persist in coastal aquatic ecosystems. Previous studies of disease-causing strains have shownV. choleraeto be a primarily clonal bacterial species, but isolates analyzed have been strongly biased toward pathogenic genotypes, while representing only a small sample of the vast diversity in environmental strains. In this study, we characterized homologous recombination and structure among 152 environmentalV. choleraeisolates and 13 other putativeVibrioisolates from coastal waters and sediments in central California, as well as four clinicalV. choleraeisolates, using multilocus sequence analysis of seven housekeeping genes. Recombinant regions were identified by at least three detection methods in 72% of ourV. choleraeisolates. Despite frequent recombination, significant linkage disequilibrium was still detected among theV. choleraesequence types. Incongruent but nonrandom associations were observed for maximum likelihood topologies from the individual loci. Overall, our estimated recombination rate inV. choleraeof 6.5 times the mutation rate is similar to those of other sexual bacteria and appears frequently enough to restrict selection from purging much of the neutral intraspecies diversity. These data suggest that frequent recombination amongV. choleraemay hinder the identification of ecotypes in this bacterioplankton population.