Vibrio cholerae C6706 genome sequencing project.

Vibrio cholerae is an intestinal pathogen that causes cholera, a severe and sometime lethal diarrheal disease. V. cholerae is a Gram-negative facultative pathogen that can inhabit two distinct niches; this highly motile bacterium lives in the natural aquatic reservoir and can also survive and multiply in the human intestine, causing devastating illness. A primary mechanism by which the organism adapts to these different environments is through changes in global patterns of transcription. These changes alter the organism?s metabolic and protein repertoire. Thus, information about global changes in the V. cholerae transcriptome in different in vitro as well as in vivo conditions will be invaluable to enable analyses of these adaptive processes and provide potential insight for therapeutics.