Abstract
AbstractCore genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST) is commonly used to classify bacterial strains into different types, for taxonomical and epidemiological applications. However, cgMLST schemes require central databases for the nomenclature of new alleles and sequence types, which must be synchronized worldwide and involve increasingly intensive calculation and storage demands. Here, we describe a distributed cgMLST (dcgMLST) scheme that does not require a central database of allelic sequences and apply it to study evolutionary patterns of epidemic and endemic strains of the genus Neisseria. We classify 69,994 worldwide Neisseria strains into multi-level clusters that assign species, lineages, and local disease outbreaks. We divide Neisseria meningitidis into 168 endemic lineages and three epidemic lineages responsible for at least 9 epidemics in the past century. According to our analyses, the epidemic and endemic lineages experienced very different population dynamics in the past 100 years. Epidemic lineages repetitively emerged from endemic lineages, disseminated worldwide, and apparently disappeared rapidly afterward. We propose a stepwise model for the evolutionary trajectory of epidemic lineages in Neisseria, and expect that the development of similar dcgMLST schemes will facilitate epidemiological studies of other bacterial pathogens.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Jiangsu Specially-appointed Professor Project
Graduate Research and Innovation Projects of Jiangsu Province
Suzhou Science and Technology Innovations Project in Health Care
Suzhou Municipal Science and Technology Bureau
Research Program of Suzhou Key Technologies of Control and Prevention of Major Diseases and Infectious Diseases
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Chemistry,Multidisciplinary