Authors: Yuelan Yin, Hao Yao, Swapnil Doijad, Suwei Kong, Yang Shen, Xuexue Cai, Weijun Tan, Yuting Wang, Youwei Feng, Zhiting Ling, Guoliang Wang, Yachen Hu, Kai Lian, Xinyu Sun, Yuliang Liu, Chuanbin Wang, Kuhua Jiao, Guoping Liu, Ruilong Song, Xiang Chen, Zhiming Pan, Martin J. Loessner, Trinad Chakraborty, Xin’an Jiao
Published: 2019-09-30
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12072-1
Source: Full article
AbstractThe foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) is a highly heterogeneous species and currently comprises of 4 evolutionarily distinct lineages. Here, we characterize isolates from severe ovine listeriosis outbreaks that represent a hybrid sub-lineage of the major lineage II (HSL-II) and serotype 4h. HSL-II isolates are highly virulent and exhibit higher organ colonization capacities than well-characterized hypervirulent strains of Lm in an orogastric mouse infection model. The isolates harbour both the Lm Pathogenicity Island (LIPI)-1 and a truncated LIPI-2 locus, encoding sphingomyelinase (SmcL), a virulence factor required for invasion and bacterial translocation from the gut, and other non-contiguous chromosomal segments from another pathogenic species, L. ivanovii. HSL-II isolates exhibit a unique wall teichoic acid (WTA) structure essential for resistance to antimicrobial peptides, bacterial invasion and virulence. The discovery of isolates harbouring pan-species virulence genes of the genus Listeria warrants global efforts to identify further hypervirulent lineages of Lm.