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Many Strains of Vibrio Cholera

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Vibrio cholerae is a "comma" shaped Gram-negative bacteria with a single, polar flagellum for movement. There are numerous strains of V. cholerae, some of which are pathogenic and some of which are not. V. cholerae is a facultative anaerobic organism and was first isolated as the cause of cholera by an Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini in 1854, but his discovery was not widely known until Robert Koch, working independently 30 years later, publicized the knowledge and the means of fighting the disease. The entire genome contains two circular chromosomes. Chromosome 1 has 2.961.149 base pairs with 2.770 open reading frames and chromosome 2 has 1.072.315 base pairs, with 1.115 open reading frames. It is the larger first chromosome that contains the crucial genes for toxicity, regulation of toxicity and important cellular functions, such as transcription and translation.The second chromosome is determined to be different from a plasmid or megaplasmid due to the inclusion of housekeeping and other essential genes in the genome, including essential genes for metabolism, heat-shock proteins and 16S rRNA genes, which are ribosomal sub-unit genes used to track evolutionary relationships between bacteria. Also relevant in determining if the replicon is a chromosome is whether it represents a significant percentage of the genome, and chromosome 2 is 40% by size of the entire genom.(fig 1)

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