virulenceassociated
Virulenceassociated, more commonly written as virulence-associated, is a descriptor used in microbiology to refer to genes, gene products, or traits linked to an organism's capacity to cause disease in a host. The concatenated spelling virulenceassociated may appear in certain databases, annotations, or indexing systems as a label for related factors. Elements fitting this designation contribute to colonization, immune evasion, tissue damage, or spread within a host. The scope is broad and includes toxins, secreted enzymes, adhesins, capsules, iron-transport systems, and protein secretion machines such as type III or type VI secretion systems. Many virulence-associated factors are encoded on mobile genetic elements, including pathogenicity islands and plasmids, although some are part of the core genome and regulated by environmental cues.
In research and annotation, virulence-associated genes are identified by comparative genomics, expression profiling under host-mimicking conditions,