The great escape

This month's Genome Watch highlights how genomics has improved our understanding of how vaccines impact pathogen populations and their genomes.

Vaccines are arguably the most successful measure to protect against pathogens. Improving our ability to design vaccines and understanding their impact on bacteria is therefore of crucial importance. The diversity of bacterial genomes makes it challenging to target all variants of a bacterial species, and thus vaccines are often designed to target the main disease-causing types. The clearance of vaccine-target strains leaves an unoccupied niche that can be filled by strains that are not targeted by the vaccine.