Poster Presentation The 2nd Prato Conference on the Pathogenesis of Bacterial Diseases of Animals 2012

Complete sequence of two virulence-associated plasmids from necrotic enteritis isolates Clostridium perfringens type A and comparison with C. perfringens plasmids (#66)

Valeria Parreira 1 , Marcio Costa 1 , Felix Eikmeyer 2 , Jochen Blom 3 , John Prescott 1
  1. University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
  2. Institute for Genome Research and Systems Biology, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
  3. Bioinformatics Resource Facility, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Clostridium perfringens is an important pathogen of humans and animals. Certain strains of type A isolates cause necrotic enteritis (NE) in broiler chickens, a common infection. A major breakthrough in understanding virulence in NE isolates of C. perfringens was the demonstration that a new toxin, NetB, is critical for development of the disease. A netB-positive (pNetB-NE10) and a cpb2-positive plasmid (pCpb2-CP1) obtained from NE isolates were shown to be conjugative, and the plasmids were completely sequenced. Both plasmids possessed the large conjugative region characteristic of C. perfringens conjugative plasmids (CpCPs). Comparative genomic analysis of nine CpCPs, including the two plasmids described here, showed extensive gene rearrangements including pathogenicity locus and accessory gene insertions around rather than within the backbone region. The pattern that emerges from this analysis is that the major toxin-containing regions of the variety of virulence-associated CpCPs are organized as complex pathogenicity loci.