A smaller amount of HGT has also been detected between two bird pathogens M. gallisepticum and M. synoviae, and between two human urogenital pathogens, M. hominis and Ureaplasma parvum[7, 8]. Obviously, sharing a common host was a requisite for HGT www.selleckchem.com/products/YM155.html but the underlying

mechanisms behind these HGT events have yet to be described. A number of MGE, including integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs), insertion sequences (IS), phages and plasmids, have been described in these bacteria and are potential candidates for mediating these genetic transfers. Although usually abundant in species belonging to the phylum Firmicutes, only a few plasmids have been described in the different genera of the Mollicutes (Figure 1). They were first detected in the genus Spiroplasma[11,

12] and later proved widely distributed in this genus [13]. Spiroplasma plasmids that have a size ranging from 5 to more than 30 kbp were initially termed cryptic as no specific phenotype was associated with their presence. However, some of these plasmids carry genetic determinants that play a role in the transmission of the Spiroplasma citri by its vector insect [14, 15]. Within Mollicutes, the other phytopathogen organisms are phytoplasmas that remain yet uncultivated. EVP4593 in vivo In several Candidatus phytoplasma species, plasmids with a size range from 2.6 to 10.8 kbp have also been described (for a review see [16]). Unlike the spiroplasma plasmids for which no homology was detected in databases, all the phytoplasma plasmids encode a replication protein sharing similarities with the Rep proteins involved in rolling-circle Florfenicol replication (RCR) [17, 18]. For the genus Mycoplasma, which includes over 100 species, among which are significant pathogens of animals and humans [19],

only five plasmid sequences are available in databases [20–23] (Figure 1). All 5 plasmids have been isolated in Mycoplasma species belonging to the Spiroplasma phylogenetic group but are not related to the ones described in Spiroplasma species. Four are from closely related species of the M. mycoides cluster and three of them (pADB201, pKMK1, and pMmc-95010) are from the same sub-species, M. mycoides subsp. capri (Mmc). In contrast to the apparent scarcity of mycoplasma plasmids, other investigators have reported a much higher prevalence of strains with plasmids but these data were only based on agarose gel detection of extrachromosomal DNA, without DNA sequencing [24]. Figure 1 Mollicute phylogenetic tree including species for which at least one genome sequence is available. The mollicute evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood mTOR inhibitor cancer method based on the Tamura-Nei model [9]. The tree with the highest log likelihood (−8994.2924) is shown. The percentage of trees in which the associated taxa clustered together is shown next to the branches. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were obtained automatically as follows.