Gene database of Salmonella enterica subsp. Typhimurium LT2

Salmonella typhimurium is a Gram-negative, flagellated, motile bacterium known to cause gastrointestinal disease in humans. Armed with two pathogenicity islands of clusters of genes implicated in pathogenesis, S. typhimurium is a formidable pathogen for which clinical microbiology labs keep a constant lookout for in patients with diarrhoea symptoms. Being an evolutionary relative of the well-studied Escherichia coli, major questions remain on why S. typhimurium could amass two important pathogenicity islands in its genome. Specifically, what are the circumstances on which ancestral S. typhimurium acquired or evolved the two pathogenicity islands? Knowledge of these evolutionary paths would expand our understanding of how pathogen evolved from otherwise benign microbes, as well as answer the question of whether pathogenic potential is an evolutionary adaptive trait or phenotype endowed in the genome. This work sought to provide basic information of the genetic repertoire of S. typhimurium LT2 by parsing its annotated genome sequence from Genbank with an in-house MATLAB software. Comprising gene name, gene function, and gene sequence, the resource should be useful in a variety of host microbe studies seeking to elucidate how the pathogen adapts to changing environmental and nutritional conditions in the human gastrointestinal tract particularly with reference to changing dietary habits of people around the world.