Vibrio cholerae, the etiological agent of the acute secretary diarrheal disease cholera, is still a major public health concern in developing countries. In former centuries cholera was a permanent threat even to the highly developed populations of Europe, North America, and the northern part of Asia. Extensive studies on the cholera bug over more than a century have made significant advances in our understanding of the disease and ways of treating patients. V. cholerae has more than 200 serogroups, but only few serogroups have caused disease on a worldwide scale. Until the present, the evolutionary relationship of these pandemic causing serogroups was not clear. In the last decades, we have witnessed a shift involving genetically and phenotypically varied pandemic clones of V. cholerae in Asia and Africa. The exponential knowledge on the genome of several representatives V. cholerae strains has been used to identify and analyze the key determinants for rapid evolution of cholera pathogen. Recent comparative genomic studies have identified the presence of various integrative mobile genetic elements (IMGEs) in V. cholerae genome, which can be used as a marker of differentiation of all seventh pandemic clones with very similar core genome. This review attempts to bring together some of the important researches in recent times that have contributed towards understanding the genetics, epidemiology and evolution of toxigenic V. cholerae strains.
Keywords: Cholera; Genome; Mobile genetic elements; Pathogen; Serogroups; Vibrio cholerae.
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