Disentangling the population structure and evolution of the clam pathogen Vibrio tapetis

Vibrio tapetis is a fastidious slow-growing microorganism that causes the Brown Ring Disease in clams. Recently, two subspecies for this bacterial pathogen have been proposed. We have developed a multilocus sequence typing scheme and performed evolutionary studies of V. tapetis population using the great majority of isolates of V. tapetis obtained worldwide until now (30 isolates). V. tapetis constitutes a high polymorphic population, showing low diversity indexes and some genetic discontinuity among the isolates. Mutation events are more frequent than recombination, although both are approximately equally important for genetic diversification. In fact, the divergence between subspecies occurred exclusively by mutation but the diversity observed among isolates of the same subspecies appeared to be generated mostly by recombination. Between the subspecies, genetic distance is very high and almost no recurrent gene flow exists. This pathogen displays a non-clonal population structure with an ancient spatial segregation population and some degree of geographical isolation, followed by a population expansion, at least for V. tapetis subsp. tapetis. A database from this study was created and hosted on publmlst.org ( http://pubmlst.org/vtapetis/ ).