Emergence of epidemic multidrug-resistant enterococcus faecium from animal and commensal strains

Lebreton, François, van Schaik, Willem, Manson McGuire, Abigail Manson McGuire, Godfrey, Paul, Griggs, Allison, Mazumdar, Varun, Corander, Jukka, Cheng, Lu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6391-2360, Saif, Sakina, Young, Sarah, Zeng, Qiandong, Wortman, Jennifer, Birren, Bruce, Willems, Rob J. L., Earl, Ashlee M. and Gilmore, Michael S. 2013. Emergence of epidemic multidrug-resistant enterococcus faecium from animal and commensal strains. mBio 4 (4) , e00534-13. 10.1128/mBio.00534-13

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Abstract

Enterococcus faecium, natively a gut commensal organism, emerged as a leading cause of multidrug-resistant hospital-acquired infection in the 1980s. As the living record of its adaptation to changes in habitat, we sequenced the genomes of 51 strains, isolated from various ecological environments, to understand how E. faecium emerged as a leading hospital pathogen. Because of the scale and diversity of the sampled strains, we were able to resolve the lineage responsible for epidemic, multidrug-resistant human infection from other strains and to measure the evolutionary distances between groups. We found that the epidemic hospital-adapted lineage is rapidly evolving and emerged approximately 75 years ago, concomitant with the introduction of antibiotics, from a population that included the majority of animal strains, and not from human commensal lines. We further found that the lineage that included most strains of animal origin diverged from the main human commensal line approximately 3,000 years ago, a time that corresponds to increasing urbanization of humans, development of hygienic practices, and domestication of animals, which we speculate contributed to their ecological separation. Each bifurcation was accompanied by the acquisition of new metabolic capabilities and colonization traits on mobile elements and the loss of function and genome remodeling associated with mobile element insertion and movement. As a result, diversity within the species, in terms of sequence divergence as well as gene content, spans a range usually associated with speciation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Biosciences
Publisher:	American Society for Microbiology: mBio / American Society for Microbiology
ISSN:	2150-7511
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 April 2019
Date of Acceptance:	23 July 2013
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 12:59
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/120714

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