Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing Scheme for Stable, Comparative Analyses of Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli Human Disease Isolates

摘要

Campylobacteriosis is a predominant bacterial cause of acute gastroenteritis worldwide, causing substantial morbidity and costs to health care systems, in high-, middle-, and low-income countries (1). In high-income countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, the majority (90%) of human disease is caused by Campylobacter jejuni, with Campylobacter coli responsible for most of the remaining cases (2). Both of these organisms are ubiquitously present in the intestines of wild and domesticated animals, where they are thought to be harmless commensal members of the microbiota. They are found at particularly high prevalence in commercial broiler chickens, and there is some evidence that these infections may also be pathological (3). Although C. jejuni and C. coli differ by ～15% at the nucleotide sequence level across the genome (4), a single multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme has been widely adopted for the epidemiological and population analysis of both organisms (5, 6). Given their shared hosts and similar pathologies, the use of a common typing scheme is important for their analysis, and the Campylobacter MLST scheme has been highly successful in elucidating the epidemiology, population structure (7), and evolution (8) of these bacteria. MLST data have also been widely applied in attribution studies, which have implicated contaminated poultry meat as a predominant source of human Campylobacter infection in several settings (9–11).