RESEARCH ARTICLE Microevolution of Virulence-Related Genes in Helicobacter pylori Familial Infection

Helicobacter pylori, a bacterial pathogen that can infect human stomach causing gastritis, ulcers and cancer, is known to have a high degree of genome/epigenome diversity as the result of mutation and recombination. The bacteria often infect in childhood and persist for the life of the host. One of the reasons of the rapid evolution of H. pylori is that it changes its genome drastically for adaptation to a new host. To investigate microevolution and adapta-tion of the H. pylori genome, we undertook whole genome sequencing of the same or very similar sequence type in multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) with seven genes in members of the same family consisting of parents and children in Japan. Detection of nucleotide sub-stitutions revealed likely transmission pathways involving children. Nonsynonymous (amino acid changing) mutations were found in virulence-related genes (cag genes, vacA, hcpDX, tnfα, ggt, htrA and the collagenase gene), outer membrane protein (OMP) genes and other cell surface-related protein genes, signal transduction genes and restriction-modification genes. We reconstructed various pathways by which H. pylori can adapt to a new human host, and our results raised the possibility that the mutational changes in virulence-relate