Shigella sonnei.

Shigella sonnei is a rod-shaped, Gram-negative facultative intracellular pathogen. It was named ‘Sonne’s bacillus’ after Carl Olaf Sonne who described it as a causative agent of bacillary dysentery. S. sonnei is distributed worldwide and represents the most common cause of shigellosis in industrialized regions in Europe, North America, and Australia. It is currently undergoing expansion in middle-income countries across Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. S. sonnei evolved from Escherichia coli to specialize in intracellular infection of the human gut epithelium, and its genome comprises a 4.99 Mbp circular chromosome and a 216 kbp invasion plasmid (pINV) required for virulence. The chromosome is ~6% smaller than other E. coli and is punctuated by >300 copies of insertion sequence (IS) elements, whose expansion has degraded the genome through disruption and deletion of genes. Here we describe the key and disease facts allowing bacteria to evade host immune defences and to establish infection.

Supplementary Material

Supplementalinformationassociatedwiththisarticlecanbefoundonlineat https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2020.02.011.