Assessment of molecular typing methods to determine invasiveness and to differentiate clones of Streptococcus pneumoniae

Infect Genet Evol. 2007 Dec;7(6):708-16. doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2007.07.011. Epub 2007 Jul 27.

Abstract

In the United States, Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of community-acquired pneumonia and invasive bacterial disease. As antimicrobial resistance increases, it will become critical to determine if strains circulating in a population are likely to cause invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD). This is possible by comparison of an isolate's genotype to strains known to be invasive. In this work, we compared pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST), comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and multi-invasive-locus sequence typing (MILST) for their ability to distinguish between known IPD causing and carrier strains using phylogenetic analyses. In addition, we assess the ability of these techniques to determine true clones from highly related strains. The resulting trees suggest that despite similar overall topologies, the clearest picture of invasiveness and genetic relatedness can be viewed when typing methods are used collectively.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Carrier State
  • Cohort Studies
  • Electrophoresis, Gel, Pulsed-Field
  • Genes, Bacterial
  • Humans
  • Microbial Sensitivity Tests
  • Molecular Epidemiology
  • Nucleic Acid Hybridization
  • Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis
  • Phylogeny
  • Streptococcal Infections / epidemiology
  • Streptococcal Infections / microbiology*
  • Streptococcus pneumoniae / classification*
  • Streptococcus pneumoniae / drug effects
  • Streptococcus pneumoniae / genetics
  • Streptococcus pneumoniae / pathogenicity
  • Streptococcus pneumoniae / physiology