Establishment of a Publicly Available Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing Scheme for Clostridium perfringens
Mostafa Y. Abdel‐Glil, Prasad Thomas, Jörg Linde, Keith A. Jolley, Dag Harmsen, Lothar H. Wieler, Heinrich Neubauer, Christian Seyboldt
Abstract
Global epidemiological surveillance of bacterial pathogens is enhanced by the availability of standard tools and sharing of typing data. The use of whole-genome sequencing has opened the possibility for high-resolution characterization of bacterial strains down to the clonal and subclonal levels. Core genome multilocus sequence typing is a robust system that uses highly conserved core genes for deep genotyping. The method has been successfully and widely used to describe the epidemiology of various bacterial species. Nevertheless, a cgMLST typing scheme for Clostridium perfringens is currently not publicly available. In this study, we (i) developed a cgMLST typing scheme for C. perfringens, (ii) evaluated the performance of the scheme on different sets of C. perfringens genomes from different hosts and geographic regions as well as from different outbreak situations, and, finally, (iii) made this scheme publicly available supported by an allele nomenclature database for global and standard genomic typing.