At the beginning of August, Nature published a report that the genome of the bacteria that causes Cholera had been sequenced. So far the only other disease that has been completely sequences is E. coli.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded the effort to decode the cholera gene. Cholera was a major killer in the 19th century and early 20th century but had largely disappeared as a major killer of people around the world until it re-emerged in many areas of the developing world beginning in the 1970s. In Latin America, for example, there had been almost no recorded cases of cholera in over a century before the disease spread throughout the area beginning in 1991.
Cholera causes diarrhea and is usually contracted by drinking contaminated water. Although today it is not a major killer, but in the 1990s it infected hundreds of thousands of people and caused several thousand deaths.
The sequencing turned up one unusual twist about cholera — most bacteria have a single chromosome, but cholera turns out to have two chromosomes of different sizes. John Mekalanos of Harvard Medical School told the BBC that, “it makes us think that part of its environmental adaptation has to do with the second chromosome. It gives us very specific experiments that we can do to address the role of genes in the small chromosome.”
If all goes well in the next three or four year the result of such investigations will yield better treatments and hopefully more effective vaccines for cholera.
Source:
Scientists sequence genome of cholera bacteria. CNN. August 2, 2000.