1932

Abstract

Abstract

Bacterial pathogens face stringent challenges to their survival because of the many unpredictable, often precipitate, and dynamic changes that occur in the host environment or in the process of transmission from one host to another. Bacterial adaptation to their hosts involves either a mechanism for sensing and responding to external changes or the selection of variants that arise through mutation. Here we review how bacterial pathogens exploit localized hypermutation, through polymerase slippage of simple sequence repeats (SSRs), to generate phenotypic variation and enhanced fitness. These SSRs are located within the reading frame or in the promoter of a subset of genes, often termed contingency loci, whose functions are usually involved in direct interactions with host structures.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.genet.40.110405.090442
2006-12-01
2024-03-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.genet.40.110405.090442
Loading
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.genet.40.110405.090442
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Review Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error