REVIEW ARTICLE published: 07 March 2014 doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2014.00091 Vibrio fluvialis: an emerging human pathogen Thandavarayan Ramamurthy 1*, Goutam Chowdhury 1, Gururaja P.Pazhani 1 and Sumio Shinoda 2 1 National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, India 2 National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Collaborative Research Center of Okayama University for Infectious Diseases in India, Kolkata, India Edited by: Vibrio fluvialis is a pathogen commonly found in coastal environs. Considering recent Rita R. Colwell, University of increase in numbers of diarrheal outbreaks and sporadic extraintestinal cases, V.fluvialis has Maryland, USA been considered as an emerging pathogen. Though this pathogen can be easily isolated Reviewed by: by existing culture methods, its identification is still a challenging problem due to close Carlos R. Osorio, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain phenotypic resemblance either with Vibrio cholerae or Aeromonas spp. However, using Brian Austin, University of Stirling, UK molecular tools, it is easy to identify V. fluvialis from clinical and different environmental *Correspondence: samples. Many putative virulence factors have been reported, but its mechanisms of Thandavarayan Ramamurthy, National pathogenesis and survival fitness in the environment are yet to be explored. This chapter Institute of Cholera and Enteric covers some of the major discoveries that have been made to understand the importance Diseases, P-33, CIT Road, Scheme-XM, Beliaghata, of V. fluvialis. Kolkata-700010, India Keywords:V. fluvialis, diarrhea, virulence factors, antimicrobial resistance, molecular typing e-mail:
[email protected] INTRODUCTION importance of V. fluvialis (Chowdhury et al., 2012; Liang et al., Vibrio fluvialis is a halophilic Gram-negative bacterium, which 2013).