Genome-wide identification of lineage and locus specific variation associated with pneumococcal carriage duration
Abstract
Streptococcus pneumoniae is a leading cause of invasive disease in infants, especially in low-income settings. Asymptomatic carriage in the nasopharynx is a prerequisite for disease, but variability in its duration is currently only understood at the serotype level. Here we developed a model to calculate the duration of carriage episodes from longitudinal swab data, and combined these results with whole genome sequence data. We estimated that pneumococcal genomic variation accounted for 63% of the phenotype variation, whereas the host traits considered here (age and previous carriage) accounted for less than 5%. We further partitioned this heritability into both lineage and locus effects, and quantified the amount attributable to the largest sources of variation in carriage duration: serotype (17%), drug-resistance (9%) and other significant locus effects (7%). A pan-genome-wide association study identified prophage sequences as being associated with decreased carriage duration independent of serotype, potentially by disruption of the competence mechanism. These findings support theoretical models of pneumococcal competition and antibiotic resistance.
Data availability
-
Dense genomic sampling identifies highways of pneumococcal recombinationPublicly available in the NCBI Sequencing Read Archive (SRA) under study accessions ERP000435, ERP000483, ERP000485, ERP000487, ERP000598 and ERP000599.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Wellcome (98051)
- John A Lees
- Julian Parkhill
- Stephen D Bentley
Medical Research Council (1365620)
- John A Lees
Royal Society (104169/Z/14/Z)
- Nicholas J Croucher
Royal Society (104169/Z/14/Z)
- Nicholas J Croucher
Wellcome (083735/Z/07/Z)
- Paul Turner
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Written informed consent was obtained from the mothers prior to study enrolment. Ethical approval was granted by the ethics committees of the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Thailand (MUTM-2009-306) and Oxford University, UK (OXTREC-031-06).
Copyright
© 2017, Lees et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,637
- views
-
- 536
- downloads
-
- 93
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Medicine
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Immunology and Inflammation
eLife has published articles on a wide range of infectious diseases, including COVID-19, influenza, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria and typhoid fever.
-
- Genetics and Genomics
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Polyamines are biologically ubiquitous cations that bind to nucleic acids, ribosomes, and phospholipids and, thereby, modulate numerous processes, including surface motility in Escherichia coli. We characterized the metabolic pathways that contribute to polyamine-dependent control of surface motility in the commonly used strain W3110 and the transcriptome of a mutant lacking a putrescine synthetic pathway that was required for surface motility. Genetic analysis showed that surface motility required type 1 pili, the simultaneous presence of two independent putrescine anabolic pathways, and modulation by putrescine transport and catabolism. An immunological assay for FimA—the major pili subunit, reverse transcription quantitative PCR of fimA, and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that pili synthesis required putrescine. Comparative RNAseq analysis of a wild type and ΔspeB mutant which exhibits impaired pili synthesis showed that the latter had fewer transcripts for pili structural genes and for fimB which codes for the phase variation recombinase that orients the fim operon promoter in the ON phase, although loss of speB did not affect the promoter orientation. Results from the RNAseq analysis also suggested (a) changes in transcripts for several transcription factor genes that affect fim operon expression, (b) compensatory mechanisms for low putrescine which implies a putrescine homeostatic network, and (c) decreased transcripts of genes for oxidative energy metabolism and iron transport which a previous genetic analysis suggests may be sufficient to account for the pili defect in putrescine synthesis mutants. We conclude that pili synthesis requires putrescine and putrescine concentration is controlled by a complex homeostatic network that includes the genes of oxidative energy metabolism.