Molecular Characterization of Campylobacter jejuni Clones: A Basis for Epidemiologic Investigation

摘要

A total of 814 isolates of the foodborne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni were characterized by multilocussequence typing (MLST) and analysis of the variation of two cell-surface components: the heat-stable(HS) serotyping antigen and the flagella protein FlaA short variable region (SVR). We identified 379 combi-nations of the MLST loci (sequence types) and 215 combinations of the cell-surface components amongthese isolates, which had been obtained from human disease, animals, food, and the environment.Despite this diversity, 748 (92%) of the isolates belonged to one of 17 clonal complexes, 6 of which con-tained many (318, 63%) of the human disease isolates. Several clonal complexes exhibited associationswith isolation source or particular cell-surface components; however, the latter were poorly predictive ofclonal complex. These data demonstrate that the clonal complex, as defined by MLST, is an epidemiologi-cally relevant unit for both long and short-term investigations of C. jejuni epidemiology