Improved characterisation of MRSA transmission using within-host bacterial sequence diversity
Abstract
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) transmission in the hospital setting has been a frequent subject of investigation using bacterial genomes, but previous approaches have not yet fully utilised the extra deductive power provided when multiple pathogen samples are acquired from each host. Here, we use a large dataset of MRSA sequences from multiply-sampled patients to reconstruct colonisation of individuals in a high-transmission setting in a hospital in Thailand. We reconstructed transmission trees for MRSA. We also investigated transmission between anatomical sites on the same individual, finding that this either occurs repeatedly or involves a wide transmission bottleneck. We examined the between-subject bottleneck, finding a wide range in the amount of diversity transmitted. Finally, we compared our approach to the simpler method of identifying transmission pairs using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) counts. This suggested that the optimum threshold for identifying a pair is 39 SNPs, if sensitivities and specificities are equally weighted.
Citation
Hall , M D , Holden , M TG , Srisomang , P , Mahavanakul , W , Wuthiekanun , V , Limmathurotsakul , D , Fountain , K , Parkhill , J , Nickerson , E K , Peacock , S J & Fraser , C 2019 , ' Improved characterisation of MRSA transmission using within-host bacterial sequence diversity ' , eLife , vol. 8 , e46402 . https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46402
Publication
eLife
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2050-084XType
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 Hall et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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