Project

Members of the genus Yersinia include environmental as well as pathogenic bacteria. Pathogenic species (Y. pestis, Y. pseudotuberculosis and Y. enterocolitica) have historically been targets for research aimed at understanding how bacteria evolve into diverse mammalian pathogens. The advent of large-scale population genomic studies has greatly accelerated the progress in this field, revealing how gene gain, gene loss and genome rearrangement events have impacted evolution of enteropathogenic bacteria. In the context of the sequencing of many novel genomes of Yersinia spp., within this project we are interested in the generation of a bioinformatic tool that will allow us to compare and visualize single nucleotide polymorphisms as well as genome organization in members of the genus Yersinia, in order to better understand genomic events that drive evolution within this bacterial species.