Abstract
Infections due to Staphylococcus argenteus have been increasingly reported worldwide and the microbe cannot be distinguished from Staphylococcus aureus by standard methods. Its complement of virulence determinants and antibiotic resistance genes remain unclear, and how far these are distinct from those produced by S. aureus remains undetermined. In order to address these uncertainties, we have collected 132 publicly available sequences from fourteen different countries, including the United Kingdom, between 2005 and 2018 to study the global genetic structure of the population. We have compared the genomes for antibiotic resistance genes, virulence determinants and mobile genetic elements such as phages, pathogenicity islands and presence of plasmid groups between different clades. 20% (n = 26) isolates were methicillin resistant harboring a mecA gene and 88% were penicillin resistant, harboring the blaZ gene. ST2250 was identified as the most frequent strain, but ST1223, which was the second largest group, contained a marginally larger number of virulence genes compared to the other STs. Novel S. argenteus pathogenicity islands were identified in our isolates harboring tsst-1, seb, sec3, ear, selk, selq toxin genes, as well as chromosomal clusters of enterotoxin and superantigen-like genes. Strain-specific type I modification systems were widespread which would limit interstrain transfer of genetic material. In addition, ST2250 possessed a CRISPR/Cas system, lacking in most other STs. S. argenteus possesses important genetic differences from S. aureus, as well as between different STs, with the potential to produce distinct clinical manifestations.
Highlights
Staphylococcus argenteus is a newly described species of bacteria associated with communityassociated infection, which was first identified as a divergent clade within the Staphylococcus aureus clonal complex (CC)75 (Holt et al, 2011)
Three of the four United Kingdom isolates included in this study were from Scotland and were clinically misidentified as S. aureus until the whole genome SNP analysis identified them as outliers and were subsequently identified as S. argenteus by MLST (Thomas et al, 2006) and were
It is important to note that the range of samples of S. argenteus analyzed here is liable to selection bias, since sampling strategies will vary between locations and only whole genomes that have been deposited in public databases can be analyzed
Summary
Staphylococcus argenteus is a newly described species of bacteria associated with communityassociated infection, which was first identified as a divergent clade within the Staphylococcus aureus clonal complex (CC) (Holt et al, 2011) It was formally classified as a separate species in 2015 based on its genetic signature (Tong et al, 2015). Given the non-random selection of strains for sequencing, these patterns may not reflect the overall prevalence of antibiotic resistance within S. argenteus in these regions. Another emerging ST of S. argenteus, ST1223, which had been reported related to food poisoning (Suzuki et al, 2017; Wakabayashi et al, 2018) was found to be resistant to methicillin
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