Comparative Genomic Analysis of Clinical Strains of Campylobacter jejuni from South Africa

Background. The bacterial foodborne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni is a common cause of acute gastroenteritis and is also associated with the postinfectious neuropathies, Guillain-Barré and Miller Fisher syndromes. This study described the use of multilocus sequence typing and DNA microarrays to examine the genetic content of a collection of South African C. jejuni strains, recovered from patients with enteritis, Guillain-Barré or Miller Fisher syndromes. Methodology/Principal Findings. The comparative genomic analysis by using multilocus sequence typing and DNA microarrays demonstrated that the South African strains with Penner heat-stable (HS) serotype HS:41 were clearly distinct from the other South African strains. Further analysis of the DNA microarray data demonstrated that the serotype HS:41 strains from South African GBS and enteritis patients are highly similar in gene content. Interestingly, the South African HS:41 strains were distinct in gene content when compared to serotype HS:41 strains from other geographical locations due to the presence of genomic islands, referred to as Campylobacter jejuni integrated elements. Only the genomic integrated element CJIE1, a Campylobacter Mu-like prophage, was present in the South African HS:41 strains whereas absent in the closely-related HS:41 strains from Mexico. A more distantly-related HS:41 strain from Canada possessed both genomic integrated elements CJIE1 and CJIE2. Conclusion/Significance. These findings demonstrated that these C. jejuni integrated elements may contribute to the differentiation of closely-related C. jejuni strains. In addition, the presence of bacteriophage-related genes in CJIE1 may probably contribute to increasing the genomic diversity of these C. jejuni strains. This comparative genomic analysis of the foodborne pathogen C. jejuni provides fundamental information that potentially could lead to improved methods for analyzing the epidemiology of disease outbreaks and their sources. Keywords: comparative genomic indexing analysis Overall design: The genomic diversity of 33 South African, 2 Mexican and 1 Canadian Campylobacter jejuni strains from humans were examined by microarray-based comparative genomic indexing (CGI) analysis. The CGI analysis allowed the assessment of CDS content for each C. jejuni strain relative to the C. jejuni DNA microarray, which comprises ORFs from strains NCTC 11168, RM1221. ORFs were spotted in duplicate. Genomic DNA from strains NCTC 11168/RM1221 were used as a reference DNA and competitively hybridized with genomic DNA from each of the other C. jejuni strains. Two or three replicates for each strain were performed. Data normalization was performed as in Parker et al. J Clin Microbiol 2006, 44(11):4125-4135.