Live vaccine formulations of 316 F alone were used in the 1960’s and 70’s in the UK [17] and Cyprus [18], 1980’s in Hungary [19], 1990’s in Germany [20] and Spain [21] and up until 2002 in New Zealand

[22]. Killed see more preparations of 316 F alone have been used extensively worldwide [23] and are still available for commercial use. These strains, due to the difficulty in retaining mycobacteria in frozen seed stocks, have been maintained through regular subculture on a variety of laboratory in-house media. It is unsurprising therefore, that some reports Selleckchem GW 572016 suggest strain adaptation to growth in specialized media with loss of Mycobactin J dependence [24] and genome diversity [25] has occurred amongst some lineages. In this AR-13324 work we demonstrate attenuation and differential virulence of vaccine strains 2e, II and 316 F in a mouse model and use a full MAP genome microarray, supported by PCR and sequencing to investigate the genomic shifts of vaccine strains from a variety of lineages, including one recently resuscitated 316 F strain, originally

lyophilised in 1966. We describe large genomic regions with deletions and tandem duplications uniquely associated with each vaccine clade, demonstrate the functionality of some of these deleted genes and hypothesise 3-oxoacyl-(acyl-carrier-protein) reductase as to their role in virulence

attenuation. Results Comparative Genomic Hybridisation of vaccine strains MAPAC hybridisations comparing each vaccine strain against a MAPK10 reference control were made (in duplicate) and averaged values displayed as scatterplots (Figure  1a and Figure  1b). Significant loss of signals in contiguous genes representative of large variable genomic island (vGI) deletions were identified in a 26.8 Kbp region of 316FNOR1960 (vGI-19: MAP3714-MAP3735c; Table  1) and a 32.8 Kbp region in both IIUK2000 and 2eUK2000 (vGI-20: MAP1694-MAP1727; Table  2). Two fold increases in signals were also seen in contiguous genes within a 24.9 Kbp region of IIUK2000 (vGI-21: MAP2705c-MAP2733c; Table  3), a 40.7 Kbp region of 316 F-NLD1978 (vGI-22: MAP1750-MAP1789, Table  4) and a 11.0 Kbp 316FUK2000 (vGI-1b: MAP0096c-MAP0104; Table  5). Figure 1 Microarray scatterplots comparing genomes of test MAP vaccine strains against MAP K10 reference strain.