Uncovering Listeria monocytogenes hypervirulence by harnessing its biodiversity

By M. Maury, Yu-Huan Tsai, C. Charlier, Marie Touchon, V. Chenal-Francisque, A. Leclercq, Alexis Criscuolo, Charlotte Gaultier, S. Roussel, A. Brisabois and 4 more. Nature Genetics, 2016

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Microbial pathogenesis studies are typically performed with reference strains, thereby overlooking within-species heterogeneity in microbial virulence. Here we integrated human epidemiological and clinical data with bacterial population genomics to harness the biodiversity of the model foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes and decipher the basis of its neural and placental tropisms. Taking advantage of the clonal structure of this bacterial species, we identify clones epidemiologically associated either with food or with human central nervous system (CNS) or maternal-neonatal (MN) listeriosis. The latter clones are also most prevalent in patients without immunosuppressive comorbidities. Strikingly, CNS- and MN-associated clones are hypervirulent in a humanized mouse model of listeriosis. By integrating epidemiological data and comparative genomics, we have uncovered multiple new putative virulence factors and demonstrate experimentally the contribution of the first gene cluster mediating L. monocytogenes neural and placental tropisms. This study illustrates the exceptional power in harnessing microbial biodiversity to identify clinically relevant microbial virulence attributes.

Subfields: Biotechnology, Endocrinology, Food Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/212f9e083fd98f0ab78f346c8d616e58d28ecf7d

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Citations in the corpus

The European Union One Health 2018 Zoonoses Report (2019, background): “At the processing or retail level, clonal complex determination and/or WGStyping would also bring a new insight of level of risk for RTE food, as it was recently shown that virulence of some strains is particularly higher than others (Maury et al., 2016; Fritsch et al., 2018).”