Spatiotemporal persistence of multiple, diverse clades and toxins of Corynebacterium diphtheriae

Robert C. Will, Thandavarayan Ramamurthy, Naresh Chand Sharma, Balaji Veeraraghavan, Lucky Sangal, Pradeep Haldar, Agila Kumari Pragasam, Karthick Vasudevan, Dhirendra Kumar, Bhabatosh Das, Eva Heinz, Vyacheslav Melnikov, Stephen Baker, Vartul Sangal, Gordon Dougan and Ankur Mutreja ()
Additional contact information
Robert C. Will: University of Cambridge
Thandavarayan Ramamurthy: Translational Health Science and Technology Institute
Naresh Chand Sharma: Maharishi Valmiki Infectious Diseases Hospital
Balaji Veeraraghavan: Christian Medical College
Lucky Sangal: World Health Organization
Pradeep Haldar: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of India
Agila Kumari Pragasam: Christian Medical College
Karthick Vasudevan: Christian Medical College
Dhirendra Kumar: Translational Health Science and Technology Institute
Bhabatosh Das: Translational Health Science and Technology Institute
Eva Heinz: Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Vyacheslav Melnikov: Gabrichevsky Research Institute for Epidemiology and Microbiology
Stephen Baker: University of Cambridge
Vartul Sangal: Northumbria University
Gordon Dougan: University of Cambridge
Ankur Mutreja: University of Cambridge

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Diphtheria is a respiratory disease caused by the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Although the development of a toxin-based vaccine in the 1930s has allowed a high level of control over the disease, cases have increased in recent years. Here, we describe the genomic variation of 502 C. diphtheriae isolates across 16 countries and territories over 122 years. We generate a core gene phylogeny and determine the presence of antimicrobial resistance genes and variation within the tox gene of 291 tox+ isolates. Numerous, highly diverse clusters of C. diphtheriae are observed across the phylogeny, each containing isolates from multiple countries, regions and time of isolation. The number of antimicrobial resistance genes, as well as the breadth of antibiotic resistance, is substantially greater in the last decade than ever before. We identified and analysed 18 tox gene variants, with mutations estimated to be of medium to high structural impact.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21870-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-21870-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21870-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().