Molecular typing of Legionella pneumophila isolates from environmental water samples and clinical samples using a five-gene sequence typing and standard Sequence-Based Typing

Inadequate discriminatory power to distinguish between L. pneumophila isolates, especially those belonging to disease-related prevalent sequence types (STs) such as ST1, ST36 and ST47, is an issue of SBT scheme. In this study, we developed a multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme based on two non-...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-02, Vol.13 (2), p.e0190986-e0190986
Main Authors: Zhan, Xiao-Yong, Zhu, Qing-Yi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Cooling
Discrimination
Epidemics
Epidemiology
Evolution
Gene loci
Genomes
Genomics
Genotypes
Infections
Laboratories
Legionella
Legionella pneumophila
Legionnaires disease
Legionnaires' disease bacterium
Loci
Medicine and Health Sciences
Molecular chains
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Multilocus sequence typing
Outbreaks
Phylogeny
Pneumonia
Population
Research and analysis methods
Strains (organisms)
Studies
Virulence
Water analysis
Water isolates
Water sampling
Water sources
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Inadequate discriminatory power to distinguish between L. pneumophila isolates, especially those belonging to disease-related prevalent sequence types (STs) such as ST1, ST36 and ST47, is an issue of SBT scheme. In this study, we developed a multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme based on two non-virulence loci (trpA, cca) and three virulence loci (icmK, lspE, lssD), to genotype 110 L. pneumophila isolates from various natural and artificial water sources in Guangdong province of China, and compared with the SBT. The isolates were assigned to 33 STs of the SBT and 91 new sequence types (nSTs) of the MLST. The indices of discrimination (IODs) of SBT and MLST were 0.920 and 0.985, respectively. Maximum likelihood trees of the concatenated SBT and MLST sequences both showed distinct phylogenetic relationships between the isolates from the two environments. More intragenic recombinations were detected in nSTs than in STs, and they were both more abundant in natural water isolates. We found out the MLST had a high discriminatory ability for the disease-associated ST1 isolates: 22 ST1 isolates were assigned to 19 nSTs. Furthermore, we assayed the discrimination of the MLST for 29 reference strains (19 clinical and 10 environmental). The clinical strains were assigned to eight STs and ten nSTs. The MLST could also subtype the prevalent clinical ST36 or ST47 strains: eight ST36 strains were subtyped into three nSTs and two ST47 strains were subtyped into two nSTs. We found different distribution patterns of nSTs between the environmental and clinical ST36 isolates, and between the outbreak clinical ST36 isolates and the sporadic clinical ST36 isolates. These results together revealed the MLST scheme could be used as part of a typing scheme that increased discrimination when necessary.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0190986