Journal article
Emergence of scarlet fever streptococcus pyogenes emm12 clones in hong kong is associated with toxin acquisition and multidrug resistance
MR Davies, MT Holden, P Coupland, JHK Chen, C Venturini, TC Barnett, NLB Zakour, H Tse, G Dougan, KY Yuen, MJ Walker
Nature Genetics | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2015
DOI: 10.1038/ng.3147
Abstract
A scarlet fever outbreak began in mainland China and Hong Kong in 2011 (refs. 1–6). Macrolide-and tetracycline-resistant Streptococcus pyogenes emm12 isolates represent the majority of clinical cases. Recently, we identified two mobile genetic elements that were closely associated with emm12 outbreak isolates: the integrative and conjugative element ICE-emm12, encoding genes for tetracycline and macrolide resistance, and prophage fHKU.vir, encoding the superantigens SSA and SpeC, as well as the DNase Spd1 (ref. 4). Here we sequenced the genomes of 141 emm12 isolates, including 132 isolated in Hong Kong between 2005 and 2011. We found that the introduction of several ICE-emm12 variants, fHKU...
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Awarded by Wellcome Trust
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the core sequencing and pathogen informatics teams at the Sanger Institute for their assistance. This work was supported by National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) program grant 565526, Australian Research Council grant DP140102881, a Research Fund for the Control of Infectious Diseases Commissioned Grant from the Hong Kong government and Wellcome Trust grant 098051. M.R.D. is supported by an NHMRC postdoctoral training fellowship (635250). M.J.W. is supported by an NHMRC principal research fellowship (631386).