Population Structure of Clinical Vibrio parahaemolyticus from 17 Coastal Countries, Determined through Multilocus Sequence Analysis

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 9; no. 9; p. e107371
• Main Authors: Han, Dongsheng, Tang, Hui, Lu, Jun, Wang, Guangzhou, Zhou, Lin, Min, Lingfeng, Han, Chongxu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 16.09.2014; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Bioinformatics; Biology and Life Sciences; Cloning; Coastal environments; Data base management systems; Data bases; Epidemics; Epidemiology; Evolution; Food; Foodborne Diseases - microbiology; Gastroenteritis; Genetic diversity; Genetic Loci; Genetic Variation; Global Health; Hospitals; Humans; Illnesses; Infections; Medicine and Health Sciences; Multilocus Sequence Typing; Outbreaks; Pandemics; Phylogenetics; Phylogeny; Phylogeography; Population; Population structure; RecA protein; Research and Analysis Methods; Seafood; Seafoods; Seawater; Studies; Vibrio Infections - microbiology; Vibrio parahaemolyticus; Vibrio parahaemolyticus - classification; Vibrio parahaemolyticus - genetics; Water-borne diseases; Waterborne diseases
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107371

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a leading cause of food-borne gastroenteritis worldwide. Although this bacterium has been the subject of much research, the population structure of clinical strains from worldwide collections remains largely undescribed, and the recorded outbreaks of V. parahaemolyticus gastroenteritis highlight the need for the subtyping of this species. We present a broad phylogenetic analysis of 490 clinical V. parahaemolyticus isolates from 17 coastal countries through multilocus sequence analysis (MLST). The 490 tested isolates fell into 161 sequence types (STs). The eBURST algorithm revealed that the 161 clinically relevant STs belonged to 8 clonal complexes, 11 doublets, and 94 singletons, showing a high level of genetic diversity. CC3 was found to be a global epidemic clone of V. parahaemolyticus, and ST-3 was the only ST with an international distribution. recA was observed to be evolving more rapidly, exhibiting the highest degree of nucleotide diversity (0.028) and the largest number of polymorphic nucleotide sites (177). We also found that the high variability of recA was an important cause of differences between the results of the eBURST and ME tree analyses, suggesting that recA has a much greater influence on the apparent evolutionary classification of V. parahaemolyticus based on the current MLST scheme. In conclusion, it is evident that a high degree of genetic diversity within the V. parahaemolyticus population and multiple sequence types are contributing to the burden of disease around the world. MLST, with a fully extractable database, is a powerful system for analysis of the clonal relationships of strains at a global scale. With the addition of more strains, the pubMLST database will provide more detailed and accurate information, which will be conducive to our future research on the population structure of V. parahaemolyticus.