Abstract
Staphylococcus lugdunensis is a commensal bacterium of human skin that has emerged as a virulent Coagulase-Negative Staphylococcus in both community-acquired and healthcare associated infections. Genotyping methods have shown a clonal population structure of this pathogen but failed to identify hypervirulent lineages. Here, complete genomes of three pathogenic and three carriage S. lugdunensis strains were obtained by Single-Molecule sequencing (PacBio) and compared to 15 complete genomes available in GenBank database. The aim was to identify (i) genetic determinants specific to pathogenic or carriage strains or specific to clonal complexes (CCs) defined by MultiLocus Sequence Typing, and (ii) antibiotic resistance genes and new putative virulence factors encoded or not by mobile genetic elements (MGE). Comparative genomic analysis did not show a strict correlation between gene content and the ability of the six strains to cause infections in humans and in a Galleria mellonella infection model. However, this study identified new MGEs (five prophages, two genomic islands and one plasmid) and genetic variations of some putative virulence-associated loci, especially in CC3 strains. For a clonal population, high variability and eight CC-dependent genetic organizations were observed for the ess locus, which encodes a putative type VII secretion system (T7SS) homologous to that of S. aureus. Further phenotypic and functional studies are needed to characterize this particular CC3 and to evaluate the role of T7SS in the virulence of S. lugdunensis.
Highlights
Staphylococcus lugdunensis is a Coagulase-Negative Staphylococcal species (CoNS) that is a part of the normal human skin flora
Staphylococcus lugdunensis is associated with a wide range of diseases including skin and soft tissue infections, infective endocarditis and bone and joint infections (Frank et al, 2008)
This organism is considered as an opportunistic pathogen which can cause infections with unusual severity compared to other CoNS
Summary
Staphylococcus lugdunensis is a Coagulase-Negative Staphylococcal species (CoNS) that is a part of the normal human skin flora. Staphylococcus lugdunensis is responsible for infections ranging from minor skin and soft tissue infections (Bocher et al, 2009; Arias et al, 2010) to invasive diseases such as infective endocarditis (Non and Santos, 2017), bone and joint infections (Douiri et al, 2016; Lourtet-Hascoët et al, 2016; Argemi et al, 2017a), prosthetic device-infections (Anguera, 2005; Shah et al, 2010) and vascular catheter-related infections (Ebright et al, 2004), both in healthy host and immune-compromised patients. Multi-Virulence Locus Sequence Typing (Didi et al, 2014) as well as Multiple Locus Variable Number Tandem Repeat Analysis (MLVA) and Tandem Repeat Sequence Typing (TRST) recently developed, have confirmed this absence of link between clustering and clinical settings (Dahyot et al, 2018)
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