Prokaryotes have evolved several defence mechanisms to protect themselves from viral
predators. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and their …

Bacteria and archaea have evolved defense and regulatory mechanisms to cope with
various environmental stressors, including virus attack. This arsenal has been expanded by …

Bacterial strain typing, or identifying bacteria at the strain level, is particularly important for
diagnosis, treatment, and epidemiological surveillance of bacterial infections. This is …

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-
associated (Cas) genes are present in many bacterial and archaeal genomes. Since the …

Bacteria have been widely used as starter cultures in the food industry, notably for the
fermentation of milk into dairy products such as cheese and yogurt. Lactic acid bacteria used …

Rapid and accurate strain identification is paramount in the battle against microbial
outbreaks, and several subtyping approaches have been developed. One such method …

This taxon is one of the major phyla in the domain Bacteria, as inferred from its branching
pattern in the 16S rRNA gene tree (Garrity and Holt, 2001; Ludwig and Klenk, 2005) and …

Diphtheria is a debilitating disease caused by toxigenic Corynebacterium diphtheriae strains
and has been effectively controlled by the toxoid vaccine, yet several recent outbreaks have …

Diphtheria, caused by toxigenic strains of Corynebacterium diphtheriae, is an ancient
disease with high incidence and mortality that has always been characterized by epidemic …

We describe the development of a multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme for
Corynebacterium diphtheriae, the causative agent of the potentially fatal upper respiratory …